Vaneeva history of Byzantine literature. Byzantine literature of the 4th–6th centuries. i. Loss of real power

Having abandoned the paganism of antiquity and adopted Christianity as the ideology of a new society, the peoples of the former Roman Empire began to create their own, different culture, in the West - starting almost from scratch, in the East - preserving the fragments of the former ancient civilization and adapting them to the new world of values.

As we remember, the Ancient Roman Empire was huge, its spaces stretched from Gibraltar in the west to the Caucasus in the east. In 395, it split into two parts - the western with Rome at its head and the eastern, the capital of which was the once small village of Byzantium, which turned into the magnificent city of Constantinople. Nowadays it bears the Turkish name Istanbul (in Rus' it was called Tsargrad).

The western part of the empire broke up into many small states, which either gathered again into large territorial associations (the Empire of Charlemagne in the last quarter of the 8th - early 9th centuries), or disintegrated.

The eastern part of the empire managed to maintain a unified statehood throughout its entire territory, and it included Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor and the Black Sea coast of Colchis (the present-day Caucasus), the Balkan Peninsula and the islands of the Aegean Sea. This was originally Byzantium. Its inhabitants called themselves Romans and considered their country the “second Rome” - the custodian of the former glory of Rome.

The history of Byzantium was complicated. She was pressed on all sides by her enemies, hungry for her riches. The last rise of its glory and its power was the reign of Emperor Justinian I. He expanded its borders to the maximum, but already in 630 the Arabs tore Egypt away from it.

In the end, the territory of Byzantium was reduced to the lands of the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor.

Byzantium adopted Christianity when it was still part of the Roman Empire, but after it was divided into eastern and western parts, church disagreements began, which in 1054 led to the final schism. In the western part, Catholicism (Greek Catholicos ecumenical, universal) was established, in the eastern part - Orthodoxy. The churches have not yet been reconciled. In 1204, Christian crusaders (we will talk about them later) of Western Europe captured Byzantium and founded the Latin Empire on part of its territory. It was liquidated about sixty years later by Michael VIII.

Russia adopted Christianity from Byzantium. The Grand Duke of Kiev Vladimir carried out the act of baptism of Rus' in 988. Byzantine icons and Byzantine literature poured into Russian cities in a wide wave, primarily, of course, Kyiv and Novgorod.

After the fall of Constantinople, which happened in 1453 under the attacks of Turkish troops, Byzantium as a state ceased to exist, and Moscow called itself the “third Rome”, taking up the historical baton of Orthodoxy. “Moscow is the third Rome, but there will never be a fourth!” - Russian clergy proudly declared.

The culture of Byzantium took shape under the ideological influence of Christian doctrine. Nowhere did religion influence culture as much as in Byzantium. Everything was permeated with it. At the very beginning, after the official recognition of Christianity as the state religion, the old Greek culture was subject to curses and condemnation. A significant part of the famous Library of Alexandria (IV century) was destroyed. In 529 the philosophical school in Athens was closed. The old cultural centers (Athens, Alexandria) have survived, but have faded significantly. Higher education was concentrated in Constantinople. In 425, a Christian higher school opened there. The new religion required propaganda forces and scientific justification. But science began to lose one position after another. In the 6th century, the monk Cosmas Indicopleus (“discoverer of India”) writes the book “Christian Topography,” in which he completely rejects the imperfect, but still closer to the truth, picture of the cosmos created in antiquity (the Ptolemaic system), and presents the Earth as a flat quadrangle, surrounded by the ocean, with paradise in the sky.

However, Byzantium did not completely break with antiquity. Its population spoke Greek, although it had already changed significantly compared to the language of antiquity. Interest in ancient authors and ancient history did not dry out. The historical picture of the world appeared, of course, in a rather fantastic form. Such, for example, is the Chronicle of George Amartol, so popular in Rus' (9th century) with a strong Christian bias and extensive use of the works of theologians and even Greek authors (Plutarch, Plato).

In the 10th century, by order of Emperor Constantine VI Porphyrogenitus, a historical encyclopedia was created, something like a historical anthology with fragments from the works of ancient historians and writers (“Biblion”). In the 11th century, the philosopher and philologist Mikhail Psel studied Homer and wrote commentaries on the comedies of Menander.

Byzantine poetry mainly consists of church hymns. A great master of this genre was the Syrian Roman Sladkopevets (VI century).

Most of the Byzantine prose consists of the lives of hermit saints (Pateriki), but novels about love and adventure novels were also written. The novel about Alexander the Great with a series of adventures, but not without Christian symbolism, was very popular.

Byzantine art bears the stamp of a different worldview and a different aesthetic ideal compared to ancient times. The artist abandoned the ideal of a harmoniously developed person and saw disharmony and disproportion both in the world and in the individual; he turned away from physical beauty and was imbued with respect for the spiritual principle. In Byzantine icons we feel this master’s craving for spirituality, for detachment from the world; in the icon we see, first of all, the eyes of the God or saint depicted in it - huge mournful eyes like a mirror of the soul.

In the lives of the saints we find the same desire for spirituality. The writer shows a small man with a weak, frail body, but with an indestructible will. In the struggle between flesh and spirit, the spirit wins, and the writer glorifies this victory.

Byzantine culture did not give the world a single significant author, not a single name capable of taking a place next to the famous masters of Western European medieval culture, but it retained something of antiquity, a smoldering ember from a once bright fire. After the fall of Constantinople, she moved it to Europe (Renaissance).

One more small addition to the topic: we have an icon of the Vladimir Mother of God. It was created in Constantinople in the first half of the 12th century. Transferred to Russia, it entered the life of the people and is associated with many significant events in Russian history. The icon is beautiful. Here is how a specialist describes her: “...a mother and baby are presented: she is in mournful doom to sacrifice her son, he is in serious readiness to embark on a thorny path.

They are alone in the whole world and are drawn to each other in their hopeless loneliness: the mother - bowing her head to her son, the son - fixing his childishly serious eyes on her. The noble face of the Mother of God seems almost ethereal, the nose and lips are barely outlined, only the eyes - huge sad eyes - look at the baby, at the viewer, at all of humanity, and the tragedy of the mother becomes a universal tragedy. The colors seem thick and twilight, dark, brownish-green tones dominate, and from them the baby’s face appears light, contrasting with the mother’s face. Aimed at elevating a person to divine contemplation, such an icon as the Vladimir Mother of God gave the viewer a feeling of the hopeless sorrow of earthly existence” (Kazhdan A.P. “Byzantine Culture”).

The scientific literature on Byzantium is immense. Twice a year, the most authoritative international journal of Byzantine studies, the Byzantinische Zeitschrift (literally, "Byzantine Journal") compiles an annotated bibliography of new works on Byzantine studies, and the typically 300-400 page issue contains between 2,500 and 3,000 items. It’s not easy to navigate such a flurry of publications. Moreover, this is literature in different languages: Byzantine studies (like, for example, classical philology) never became an English-language discipline, and every Byzantinist is required to read at least German, French, Italian, Modern Greek and Latin (Latin for Byzantinists is not only a language sources, but also a working tool: in accordance with tradition, it is on it that prefaces to critical publications are written to this day). At the beginning of the 20th century, this mandatory list also included the Russian language, but now Turkish is gaining an increasingly stronger position.

That is why even important books are very rarely translated. Paradoxically, even Karl Krumbacher’s programmatic book “Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur” (“History of Byzantine Literature”), which laid the foundations of scientific Byzantine studies at the end of the 19th century, has not been fully translated into any European language except Modern Greek. The situation with translations into Russian is even more deplorable - fundamental works cannot be read in it.

The list below includes one popular monograph, designed to explain what Byzantium was to a person who first asked this question, and five “classic” books that had a great influence on the development of Byzantine thought. These are either works of Russian-speaking scientists, or monographs of European researchers, available in translation (however, the quality of the translation is not always high, and if possible, it is always better to turn to the original). The list does not include important books dedicated to individual figures of Byzantine culture For example, Lyubarsky Y. N. “Mikhail Psell. Personality and creativity. On the history of Byzantine pre-humanism" (Moscow, 1978); Meyendorff I., protopres. “The Life and Works of St. Gregory Palamas: an introduction to the study” (2nd ed. St. Petersburg, 1997)., or deep research revealing some narrow layer of Byzantine culture Ousterhout R. “Byzantine Builders” (M., Kyiv, 2005); Taft R. F. “Byzantine Church Rite” (St. Petersburg, 2000)., since it would be wrong to recommend this kind of private research for the first acquaintance with Byzantium.

Judith Herrin. "Byzantium: The Amazing Life of a Medieval Empire"

Professor Judith Herrin (b. 1942) wrote her popular monograph on Byzantium - if, of course, the preface is to be believed and not considered a literary play - after being unable to answer a question from workers renovating her office at King's College London : “What is Byzantium?” (They noticed this mysterious word on the door of her office.) From a book that is unlikely to reveal anything new to a specialist, but will be useful to anyone who is asking the same question as the heroes of the preface, one should not expect a consistent presentation of Byzantine history - according to According to the author, these are just “assorted mezes” (this originally Persian word is used to describe snacks throughout the Mediterranean), designed not to satiate, but only to tease the reader’s appetite. The book is structured according to a chronological principle (from the founding of Constantinople to its fall), but its chapters are deliberately balanced - on the same level there may be, at first glance, the vast topics of “Greek Orthodoxy” or “Byzantine economy” and the very specific “Basily II the Bulgarian Slayer” and "Anna Komnena".

Herrin suggests looking at the history of Byzantium not as an endless series of emperors, generals and patriarchs with names unusual for European ears, but as the history of the people who created a civilization that, in the 7th century, protected Europe from the Arab threat,
and in the XIII-XV centuries laid the foundations of the European Renaissance - and yet the average modern European is completely unfamiliar and is reduced in his mind to stereotypes about deceit, obscurantism, flattery and pretense. Herrin masterfully deals with these stereotypes, inherited from Montesquieu and Edward Gibbon, at the same time defamiliarizing and bringing Byzantium closer. She describes Byzantium with elegant paradoxes (“Byzantium’s cultural influence grew in inverse proportion to its political power”), but at the same time shows how this seemingly infinitely distant civilization breaks into the world around us, sharing childhood impressions of the mosaics of Ravenna or analyzing a speech by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006, in which he referred (however, according to Herrin, not entirely correctly) to the anti-Islamic statements of Emperor Manuel II Comnenos.

Herrin J. Byzantium: The Surprising. Life of a Medieval Empire. Princeton, N.J., 2008.
Alternative: Herrin J. Byzantium. The amazing life of a medieval empire. M., 2015.

Alexander Kazhdan. "History of Byzantine Literature"

The unfinished project of Alexander Kazhdan (1922-1997), towards which he worked for many years, gradually moving from the socio-economic issues that occupied him in his youth to the history of Byzantine literary aesthetics. Work on the volumes began in 1993, and by the time Kazhdan passed away, none of them were completely ready for publication. The books were published only nine years later, and in Greece, which is why they practically did not end up in libraries and book networks.

The published volumes are only a small part of what was to be written. They cover the period of the Dark Ages (mid-VII - mid-VIII centuries), the era of the monastic revival (c. 775 - c. 850) and the time of Byzantine encyclopedism (850-1000). Kazhdan did not have time to write about either Michael Psellos or his beloved Niketas Choniates (however, the collection of his articles “Nicetas Choniates and His Time” (St. Petersburg, 2005) can serve as some compensation for this).

The title of Kazhdan's books is unlikely to attract the attention of a reader unfamiliar with the circumstances. Meanwhile, behind the simplicity of the title lies a polemic with the founder of Byzantine studies, Karl Krumbacher, and his vast and meticulous German reference book, “The History of Byzantine Literature” (in drafts and personal correspondence, Kazhdan even abbreviated his book as GBL, as if he had written it not in English, but German). The books that replaced Krumbacher's outdated compendium in the mid-20th century (for example, the works of Herbert Hunger on high secular literature or Hans Georg Beck on church writing and vernacular literature) were also more like reference books - detailed, complexly structured, but devoid of any aesthetic assessments, lists of texts with comprehensive source characteristics and a complete bibliography.

Kazhdan’s task was different - to return to the question of “the pleasure obtained from reading a Greek medieval literary text,” to try to evaluate Byzantine literature “by its own standards,” and to understand issues of literary style. That is why the form of the book is impressionistic - Kazhdan abandoned the attempt to cover the entire literary heritage of Byzantium and created a cycle of chronologically sequential literary sketches and essays, sometimes almost devoid of reference and bibliographic apparatus. At the center of each of them is a key figure of a writer for a particular era, and lesser authors, acting in the orbit of the main character or continuing the vector given by him, are mentioned only in passing.

Kazhdan’s “History of Byzantine Literature” finally established the rights of a literary rather than a source-study approach to the monuments of Byzantine literature and caused an avalanche-like growth in the number of works on Byzantine literary aesthetics.

Kazhdan A. A History of Byzantine Literature (650-850) (in collaboration with L. F. Sherry and Ch. Angelidi). Athens, 1999.Kazhdan A. A History of Byzantine Literature (850-1000). Ed. Ch. Angelidi. Athens, 2006 Alexander Kazhdan wrote his last books in English - since since 1979 he lived in the USA and worked at the Byzantine studies center Dumbarton Oaks..
Alternative: Kazhdan A.P. History of Byzantine literature (650-850). St. Petersburg, 2002.
Kazhdan A.P. History of Byzantine literature (850-1000). The era of Byzantine encyclopedism. St. Petersburg, 2012.

Igor Medvedev. "Byzantine humanism of the XIV-XV centuries"

The first edition of the book by the current head of the St. Petersburg school of Byzantine studies, Igor Medvedev (b. 1935), took place in 1976; for the second edition in 1997 it was expanded and revised. Medvedev's monograph raises the question of humanistic trends in the culture of Late Byzantium (XIV-XV centuries) and the typological similarity of these trends with the features of the Western European Renaissance.

The central figure of the book is the Neoplatonist philosopher George Gemistus Plithon, who, at the end of Byzantine history, proposed a program for the radical renewal of the empire based on the revival of pagan Olympian cults. Consigned to oblivion in Byzantium (his most scandalous book, “Laws,” was destroyed by the Patriarch of Constantinople Gennady Scholarius), Plytho, who was an unimaginable combination of a Byzantine intellectual and a neo-pagan, has always intrigued and continues to intrigue researchers (for example, last year The prestigious English publishing house Ashgate has published a new four-hundred-page book about Plithon with the subtitle “Between Hellenism and Orthodoxy”). The chapter “The Apotheosis of Plyphon” added by Medvedev in the second edition of the book bears the characteristic subtitle “New Historiographical Wave”.

According to Medvedev, in the 14th-15th centuries, a special environment was formed in the Byzantine elite, in which trends somewhat akin to the ideas of Italian humanism became widespread. The most prominent representatives of this environment (Plytho and the writer Theodore Metochites) were ready to offer Byzantium a “Hellenistic” future based on the ideology of “secular humanism” and open recognition of the unity of Greek culture from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. However, the possibility of this alternative history never became a reality, since the “Byzantine Church, “having approved the teachings of St. Gregory Palamas... decisively turned away from the Renaissance According to Medvedev, hesychasm, substantiated by Gregory Palamas - a monastic and ascetic practice that allows a person to unite with God - was “obscurantism”, and his victory did not leave any space for free discussions about faith: a system of “political persecution modeled on the Catholic Inquisition” arose, and now for “the beginnings of a new vision of the world, a new worldview born of the Renaissance era, people had to shed blood.”“ (quote from John Meyendorff John Meyendorff(1926-1992) - American church historian, researcher of hesychasm.), and in 1453 the Turkish blade finally interrupted the political existence of Byzantium." Today, when the church component of Byzantine culture overshadows all others in the mass consciousness, such a juxtaposition of the “merits” of the Church of Constantinople and the Turks, as well as the entire anti-hesychast pathos of the book, sounds especially relevant.

Medvedev I. P. Byzantine humanism XIV-XV centuries. 2nd edition, corrected and expanded. St. Petersburg, 1997.

Sergey Averintsev. "Poetics of Early Byzantine Literature"

The book by Sergei Averintsev (1937-2004) is perhaps the most popular publication with the word “Byzantine” in the title ever published in Russia. It has been reprinted many times and is included in the reading lists for students not only in specialized Byzantine departments.

The book is both easy and difficult to read. It is almost devoid of a reference and bibliographic framework and deliberately confuses the reader with riddle headings of sections that are not formally structured in any way: “Being as perfection - beauty as being,” “Agreement in disagreement,” “The world as a riddle and solution.” The book is not a sequential presentation of the stages of the literary process in the Mediterranean region and not a reference book on genres, but a collection of cultural essays written in bright, figurative language, in which the author tries to find the specifics of Byzantine culture through literary texts that are not yet formally related to the Byzantine period ( As a rule, Byzantine literature is spoken of in relation to monuments no earlier than the 6th or even 7th century).

Averintsev proposed to abandon the endless dispute about where the border between Antiquity and Byzantium lies, recognizing that the texts he discusses (authored by Nonnus of Panopolitan or Gregory the Theologian) can rightfully be attributed to both ancient and pre-(or early) Byzantine literature. According to him, we are talking only about focus - about looking forward or backward: “We were looking in these texts, first of all, not for echoes of the old, but for features of the new; We were interested not so much in the harmony of inertia, worked out over the centuries, as in the fruitful disharmony of shift... We tried to take the most fundamental literary principles in their mobile, self-contradictory, transitional state.<…>No era can be completely “equal to itself” - otherwise the next era would have no chance of ever coming.”

Another fundamental decision of Averintsev was to include in the range of sources texts that are not literature in the modern European understanding: theological treatises, sermons, liturgical poetry. These texts, familiar to many at least from church services, but thereby torn out of the Byzantine, and even more so the ancient context that gave birth to them, are revealed precisely as works of literature and find their place in the history of literary aesthetics.

Averintsev S. Poetics of early Byzantine literature. M., 1997.

Dmitry Obolensky. "Byzantine Commonwealth of Nations"

The book by Dmitry Obolensky (1918-2001) proposed the concept of the “Byzantine Commonwealth of Nations” (similar to the British Commonwealth). Obolensky postulates the possibility of “considering [Byzantium and the countries of Eastern Europe] a single international community,” a “supernational union of Christian states,” between the parts of which there are opposite lines of tension: centrifugal (the struggle of the peoples of Eastern Europe with Byzantium in the political, cultural, ecclesiastical and military level) and centripetal (gradual perception and recognition of the primacy of the Byzantine cultural tradition in Eastern Europe). The geographical boundaries of the world described on the pages of the book are moving. The focus of the researcher’s attention moves both along a time and geographical scale, since new peoples constantly fell into the orbit of influence of Byzantine culture: the “core” of the Byzantine world in the Balkans remained unchanged, but over time, some regions moved away from Byzantium (Moravia, Croatia, Hungary) and others were approaching (Rus, Moldavia, Wallachia). The series of chronologically organized essays gives way to discussions about the factors of cultural penetration of Byzantium.

According to Obolensky, the “Commonwealth,” which was fully formed by the beginning of the 11th century, had exceptional stability and existed until the fall of Byzantium. Insisting that this is “not an intellectual abstraction,” Obolensky acknowledges that the Byzantines themselves and their neighbors were not always fully aware of the nature of their relationship and were unable to conceptualize it themselves. However, the flexibility of the terminology that described these relations had its advantages, and modern attempts to “describe them in precise legal terms<…>oversimplify and distort their nature.” The author’s fundamental decision was to refuse to see in Byzantium’s relations with Eastern European countries and regions a simplified scheme of the struggle of Byzantine “imperialism” and “local national movements.”

The idea of ​​the “Commonwealth” removed the contradiction that seemed insoluble to Obolensky’s predecessors between “the political independence of the medieval peoples of Eastern Europe” and “their recognition of the supreme power of the emperor.” Its bonds were the confession of Eastern Christianity and the recognition of the supremacy of the Church of Constantinople, the norms of Roman-Byzantine law, the supreme political power of the Byzantine emperor over the entire Orthodox world, as well as the standards of Byzantine literary and artistic aesthetics.

Obolensky D. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500-1453. London, 1971.
Alternative: Obolensky D. Byzantine Commonwealth of Nations. Six Byzantine portraits. M., 1998.

Paul Lemerle. "First Byzantine humanism"

The classic monograph of the French Byzantine scholar Paul Lemerle (1903-1989), which became available in Russian only forty years after publication, is dedicated to the cultural transformation of Byzantium during the Macedonian Renaissance (IX-X centuries) - the time of the “first” humanism, which made it possible not to only the “second”, much more famous, humanism of the Palaiologan era, but also indirectly influenced the humanism of the Western European Renaissance. The knowledge base about the ancient culture of the Byzantines, who fled to Italy after 1453, was accumulated by scientists of the 14th-15th centuries, but they, in turn, relied on the intellectuals of the Macedonian era, who were the first to rescue the works of Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus and Euripides from the oblivion of the dark ages.

The second half of the 9th - 10th centuries was the time of the Byzantines' new acquaintance with ancient culture and the accumulation and codification of knowledge in all spheres of life. Questioning the reasons for this cultural surge, Lemerle refuses to see in it an external (Carolingian western or Syro-Arab eastern) influence. In his interpretation, the possibility of such a revival was always inherent in Byzantine culture, which formally declared hatred of the pagan past, but in reality was careful about preserving its cultural heritage. Lemerle describes the relationship between Christianity and pagan antiquity in terms of “discontinuity and rupture.” Eastern Christianity condemned paganism, but was, paradoxically, a connecting element between eras. It turned the ancient tradition of education “into one of the weapons of its victory,” but (unlike the Western Church) did not follow the path of complete subordination of school education. According to Lemerle, the “first salvation of Hellenism” occurred already at the dawn of the Byzantine era, when large-scale copying of ancient papyri began in Constantinople by order of Emperor Constantius II.

In the center of each of the chapters of the main part of the book there is some important figure of the era - Leo the Mathematician, Patriarch Photius, Arethas of Caesarea, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. Independent sections are devoted to the development of school education and the technical revolution that occurred thanks to the invention of minuscule - that is, writing in lowercase letters, which made it possible to significantly speed up the rewriting, and therefore the distribution of texts. Without formally claiming to be anything more than “notes et remarques,” Lemerle comes to important conclusions about the specificity of Byzantine civilization: it combines “imperial” or “baroque” Hellenism with the church’s decision to “adopt [pagan culture] , and not destroy it,” which gave rise to the typically Byzantine “duality or, if you like, ambiguity” of the entire Byzantine culture.

Lemerle P. Le premier humanisme byzantin: Notes et remarques sur enseignement et culture à Byzance des origines au X e siècle. Paris, 1971.
Alternative: Lemerle P. First Byzantine humanism. Remarks and notes on education and culture in Byzantium from the beginning to the 10th century. St. Petersburg, 2012.  

Byzantine literature of the 4th-7th centuries is characterized by breadth and undifferentiation: it includes works of a historical nature, theology, philosophy, natural philosophy and much more. This literature is distinguished by its ethnolinguistic heterogeneity, multilingualism and multinationality. Its main line is Greek-speaking, since for the vast majority of the population the Greek language was common, which became from the end of the 6th century. official in the empire. However, along with Greek-language monuments and in interaction with them, there were works written in Latin, Syriac, Coptic and other languages.

Antique traditions continued to live in Byzantine literature for a long time, which was facilitated by the preservation of the Greek language, as well as the specifics of the training and education system. The organization of teaching in primary and higher schools played a large role in the dissemination of ancient literary monuments and in the formation of tastes. At the same time, Christianity had a huge impact on literature (as well as on the entire culture as a whole). Theological works made up a significant part of it.

In the literature of the IV-VII centuries. There are two schools of thought: one represented by pagan writers and poets, and the other by Christian authors. Such ancient genres as rhetoric, epistolography, epic, and epigram continue to develop. Next to them are new ones: chronography, hagiography and hymnography.
Early Christianity could not provide fiction in the true sense of the word. In his literary production, the balance between form and content is still too sharply disrupted in favor of content; a rigid focus on didactic “educationalness” excludes conscious concern for external design; decorative stylistic elements are rejected as unnecessary. Apocryphal narrative literature allows itself more freedom, sometimes using the techniques of the ancient novel. Christianity begins its mastery of the arsenal of pagan culture with philosophy; already by the beginning of the 3rd century. it puts forward a thinker like Origen, but does not yet produce a single author who could compete with the pillars of the “second sophistry” also in the formal mastery of words.

Only on the eve of the reign of Constantine did the growth of Christian culture and the rapprochement of the church with pagan society go so far that objective conditions were created for the combination of Christian preaching with the most refined and developed forms of rhetoric. This is how the foundations of Byzantine literature are laid.

The primacy in it belongs to prose. Back in the middle of the 3rd century. Gregory of Neocaesarea (c. 213 - c. 273) works, dedicating a “Gratitude to Origen” (or “Panegyric”) to his teacher. The topic of the speech is Origen’s years of study in church school and the path of his own spiritual formation. Her character is determined by a combination of traditional stylistic forms and autobiographical intimacy that is new in spirit; the pomp of the panegyric and the sincerity of the confession, representative and confidential intonations contrast each other. An even more conscious and clear play on the contrasts of the old form and new content is carried out in the dialogue “The Feast, or on Chastity” by Methodius of Olympus in Lycia (died in 311). The title itself alludes to Plato’s famous dialogue “The Symposium, or on Love,” the structure of which is reproduced by Methodius with great accuracy; the work is replete with Platonic reminiscences - in language, style, situations and ideas. But the place of Hellenic Eros in Methodius was taken by Christian virginity, and the content of the dialogue is the glorification of asceticism. An unexpected effect is created by the breakthrough in the finale of the prosaic fabric of presentation and the entrance to hymn poetry: the participants in the dialogue sing a solemn doxology in honor of the mystical marriage of Christ and the Church. This hymn is also new in its metrical form: for the first time in Greek poetry, tonic tendencies are explored.

Apparently, Methodius’s experience was close to the liturgical practice of Christian communities, but in “great literature” it remains for a long time without consequences. Half a century later, the student of the pagan rhetorician Epiphanius, Apollinaris of Laodicea, tries to re-found Christian poetry on different, completely traditionalist foundations. From his numerous works (hexametric transcription of both testaments, Christian hymns in the manner of Pindar, tragedies and comedies imitating the style of Euripides and Menander) came only an arrangement of the psalms in the meter and language of Homer - as masterly as it was far from the living trends of literary development. The risky combination of two disparate traditions - Homeric and biblical - is carried out with great tact: the epic vocabulary is very carefully seasoned with a small number of sayings specific to the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament), which creates an unexpected, but quite integral linguistic flavor.

Early Christianity lived not in the past, but in the future, not in history, but in eschatology and apocalypticism. By the end of the 3rd century. the situation is changing: Christians cease to feel like rootless “aliens on earth” and acquire a taste for tradition. The Church, internally ripe for spiritual domination, feels the need for an impressive perpetuation of its past.

Eusebius undertook to satisfy this need. His “Ecclesiastical History” belongs to scientific prose, while “The Life of the Blessed King Constantine” belongs to rhetorical prose. In its attitudes and style, this is a typical “encomium” (a word of praise), a product of the old ancient tradition, dating back to Isocrates (IV century BC). The Christian trend is new. The ideal monarch should not only be “fair” and “invincible,” but also “God-loving.” If the old rhetoricians compared the glorified monarchs with the heroes of Greco-Roman mythology or history, then Eusebius takes the objects of comparison from the Bible: Constantine is the “new Moses.” But the structure of the comparison itself remains the same.

It was at that moment when the church achieved full legality and political influence that it faced the need to reconsider its ideological foundations. This gave rise to the Arian controversy. She stood at the center of all public life in the 4th century. and could not help but influence the course of the literary process.

Arius brought a worldly spirit into religious literature. A brilliant preacher, he knew his listeners well - citizens of Alexandria, accustomed to the life of a big city. The ancient Christian ascetic severity of style could not count on success here; however, the traditions of pagan classics were too academic and outdated for the masses. Therefore, Arius, writing the poem “Falin” for widespread propaganda of his theological views, turned to other traditions, less respected and more vital. We know little about the poem of the famous heretic - it itself is lost (it is even possible that it was not a poem, but a mixed poetic and prose text such as the so-called Menippean satire). But the testimony of contemporaries adds up to a fairly vivid picture. According to one account, Arius imitated the style and meter of Sotades, one of the representatives of the light poetry of Alexandrian Hellenism; in another way, his poems were designed to be sung at work and on the road. Even if these reports tend to exaggerate the incriminating associations evoked by the work of Arius (Sotad's poetry was pornographic), they contain some truth. Alexandria has long been the center of the poetry of mimodias, mimiambas, etc. Arius tried to select some (of course, only purely formal) features of these genres for the emerging Christian poetry. His path was more shocking, but also more promising than the path of the Christianized classicism of Apollinaris of Laodicea.

Egyptian monks, who treated the culture of big cities with hatred, accepted such experiments with sharp hostility and went so far as to deny the very principle of liturgical poetry. From the 5th century I heard a conversation between Elder Pamva and a novice, in which the stern ascetic said: “The monks did not retire into this desert to think idle, to fold frets, to sing chants, to shake their hands, and to move their legs...” However, the process of development of church poetry that was folk in spirit and innovative in form could not be stopped. The strictest zealots of orthodoxy had to start composing chants in order to oust the hymns of heretics from everyday life. One of the exponents of the trends of the time was the Syrian Ephraim (d. 373), a successful rival of the representatives of heretical hymnography, who wrote in Syriac, but also influenced Greek-language literature; one of his texts is well known from Pushkin’s adaptation in the poem “The Desert Fathers and the Immaculate Wives...”.

The people wanted to receive intelligible and easy-to-remember poetic texts that they could, having memorized in church, sing at work and at leisure, “Travelers in a cart and on a ship, artisans engaged in sedentary work, in short, men and women, healthy and sick , they are downright revered as punishment if anything prevents them from repeating these sublime lessons,” states at the end of the 4th century. Gregory of Nyssa. The teaching of Arius was supposed to perish, his name became odious, but literary development largely followed the path indicated by his “Thalias”.

The main antagonist of Arius was the Alexandrian patriarch Athanasius. The pagan spirit of ancient traditions was deeply alien to Athanasius, but in his desire for an impressive severity of style, he adhered to school rhetorical norms. Of greatest historical and literary interest is the biography of the Egyptian ascetic Anthony, the founder of monasticism (by the way, the motif of the “temptation of St. Anthony”, popular in European art and literature right up to Flaubert’s story, goes back to it). This work was almost immediately translated into Latin and Syriac and marked the beginning of the most popular genre of monastic “life” in the Middle Ages.

The first monks of the Nile Valley shunned literary pursuits: Anthony is a new hero of literature, but he himself could not yet pick up a pen. After a few decades, the monks became involved in writing. Evagrius of Pontus (c. 346-399) founded a form typical of Byzantium - a manual of monastic ethics based on introspection and constructed from aphorisms. It is unlikely that Evagrius and his successors knew anything about the philosophical diary of Marcus Aurelius “Alone with Oneself,” but the similarities are obvious here.

Ideological life of the 4th century. deeply contradictory. While the most specific products of Byzantine Christianity - dogmatic theology, liturgical hymnography, monastic mysticism - are already acquiring clear contours, paganism does not want to leave the scene. His authority in the closed sphere of humanities education remains very high. It is characteristic that Christian authors working in traditional rhetorical and poetic genres often avoid any memories of their faith and operate exclusively with pagan images and concepts in their works. Julian the Apostate, in a tone of complete confidence, declares to Christians that no one in their own ranks will dare deny the advantages of the old pagan school.

It is the need to defend oneself in a life-and-death struggle against the onslaught of a new ideology that gives pagan culture new strength.

It experienced a special flourishing in the 4th century. rhetoric: its adherents are characterized by a deep conviction in the exceptional social significance of their work, which from time immemorial was an indispensable feature of the Greek “sophist”, but in the conditions of the struggle against Christianity received a new, in-depth meaning. In this regard, the pillar of eloquence of the 4th century is characteristic. Antiochian Libanius.

Livanius was born in Antioch, into a rich and noble family. Even as a child, he showed an interest in knowledge. The desire for education draws him to Athens, where Livanius attends high school. After graduating, he opens his own school of oratory, first in Constantinople, then in Nicomedia. From 354 he returned to his homeland, where he spent the rest of his life.

In his autobiography “Life, or about one’s destiny,” written in the form of a speech, Livanius writes: “I should try to convince those who have formed the wrong opinion about my fate: some consider me the happiest of all people in view of the wide fame that my speeches, others to the most unfortunate of all living beings, due to my incessant illnesses and disasters, meanwhile both of them are far from the truth: therefore I will tell about the previous and current circumstances of my life and then everyone will see that the gods have mixed the lot of fate for me ...".

Livanius's numerous letters (more than one and a half thousand have survived) convey his philosophical, historical, political and religious thoughts. The letters were intended for publication and therefore were interesting not only in content, but also in brilliant form.

In the eyes of Livan, the art of speech is the key to the integrity of the threatened polis structure; rhetorical aesthetics and polis ethics are interdependent. The duality of traditional eloquence and traditional citizenship is sanctified by the authority of Greek paganism - and therefore Livanius, alien to mystical quests in the spirit of the Neoplatonists, ardently sympathizes with the old religion and mourns its decline. Christianity, like all the phenomena of spiritual life of the 4th century that did not fit within the framework of the classical tradition, is not so much hateful for him as incomprehensible.

And yet, the trends of the era emerged in his work; this champion of classicist norms writes a huge autobiography, oversaturated with intimate details and akin to his understanding of the human personality to such monuments as the lyrics of Gregory of Nazianzus or Augustine’s Confessions.

The literary activity of his contemporary and friend Themistius (320-390) is closely related to the creative path of Livanius. From Livaniya's letters we learn about his respect for the merits of his rival - a “brilliant orator.” Themistius' talent was highly valued by Julian; Gregory of Nazianzus called him βασιλευς λογων.

Unlike Julian and Livanius, Themistius refrained from harsh polemics with adherents of Christianity. He was characterized by religious tolerance; It is not without reason that under all the emperors, regardless of their religion, he occupied prominent government positions. In his speech “To Valens on Confessions,” Themistius, praising the emperor, writes: “You have wisely decreed that everyone should join the religion that seems convincing to him, and in it he would seek peace for his soul...” and further: “Which It’s madness to try to ensure that all people, against their will, adhere to the same convictions!” According to Themistius, the emperor is wise to provide freedom of choice of beliefs, “so that people are not held accountable for the name and form of their religion.”

It is significant that despite his commitment to ancient philosophy, in his works there are ideas alien to the paganism of the classical period, for example, about earthly life as a prison and about the afterlife as a “happy field.” In his speeches, he talks everywhere about his love for philosophy, often turning to Plato and Socrates.

Themistius's speeches are devoid of poetic pathos, he lacks living characteristics. However, he was an excellent stylist, which greatly contributed to his fame.

The speeches of Imerius (315-386) differ in content, form and style from the speeches of Themistius. Imerius stood aloof from public and political life, was far from the court and lived in the interests of his school. Speeches related to the life of the school in Athens, where the sophist’s activities unfolded, and speeches concerning issues of rhetorical art occupy a large place in his work. In the fight against Christianity, Imerius preferred epidictic (solemn) speeches dedicated to the heroic past or glorifying the traditions of the Greek religion. These speeches are written in a lush, Asian style.

Imerius gives his speeches euphony, using images, words and expressions of ancient Greek lyricists. He himself often called his speeches “hymns.” An idea of ​​the manner of Imeria is given by a speech at the wedding of a relative of the North, where the bride and groom are described in enthusiastic tones: “They are even more similar to each other in character and blooming age: they are like young roses in the same meadow, they were born at the same time, at the same time open their petals; Their spiritual affinity is amazing - both are bashful and pure in disposition and differ from each other only in the activities inherent in the nature of each. She excelled in weaving wool, the glorious work of Athena, he finds joy in the labors of Hermes.”

The idol of Neoplatonist philosophers and pagan rhetoricians was the Emperor Flavius ​​Claudius Julian, nicknamed the “Apostate” by Christians. In his person, paganism put forward a worthy opponent to such leaders of militant Christianity as Athanasius; a man of fanatical conviction and extraordinary energy, Julian fought for the revival of paganism by all possible means, and only his death in a campaign against the Persians once and for all put an end to all the hopes of supporters of the old faith. The needs of the struggle dictated the transformation of polytheism along the lines of Christianity (Julian elevated the Neoplatonic doctrine to the rank of dogmatic theology) and the utmost consolidation of the spiritual forces of pagan culture. Julian tried to carry out this consolidation by his personal example, combining in himself a monarch, a high priest, a philosopher and a rhetorician; within philosophy and rhetoric, he in turn strives for the broadest synthesis. This makes the picture of Julian’s literary work very varied in genre, style and even language: the entire past of Greek culture, from Homer and the first philosophers to the first Neoplatonists, is equally dear to him, and he strives to resurrect it in its entirety in his own works. We find in him mystical hymns in prose, overloaded with philosophical subtleties, and at the same time captivating with the intimacy of their intonations (“To the Sun King”, “To the Mother of the Gods”), and satirical works in the manner of Lucian - the dialogue “Caesars”, where the Christian Emperor Constantine, and the diatribe “The Hater of the Beard, or the Antiochian,” where Julian’s self-portrait is presented through the perception of the inhabitants of Antioch hostile to him; finally, Julian paid tribute to epidictic eloquence and even epigrammatic poetry. Only fragments have survived from his polemical treatise “Against the Christians,” from which it is clear how passionately he criticized the religion hostile to him: “... The insidious teaching of the Galileans is an evil human fiction. Although there is nothing divine in this teaching, it managed to influence the unreasonable part of our soul, which childishly loves fairy tales, and inspired it that these fables are the truth.” He also maintained a harsh tone towards Christianity in the satires “Caesars” and “The Beard Hater.”

Despite his restorationist tendencies, Julian as a writer is closer to his turbulent times than to the classical eras for which he yearned: his inherent sense of loneliness and extremely intense personal experience of religious and philosophical problems stimulated autobiographical motives in his work; when he talks about his gods, with unprecedented intimacy, he seems to declare his love for them.

Byzantine literature recognized Julian as one of its own: considering the hatred that surrounded his name for religious reasons, the very fact of rewriting his works already in the Christian era proves that, no matter what, they found readers.

Julian’s cause was lost: according to a well-known legend, the emperor on his deathbed turned to Christ with the words: “You have won, Galilean!” But Christianity, having won politically, could fight the authority of paganism in the field of philosophy and classic literature with only one means - by assimilating as fully as possible the norms and achievements of pagan culture. In solving this problem, a huge role belongs to the so-called Cappadocian circle, which became in the second half of the 4th century. recognized center of church politics and church education in the Greek east of the empire. The core of the circle consisted of Basil from Caesarea, his brother Gregory, bishop of Nysa, and his closest friend Gregory of Nazianza.

The members of the circle stood at the pinnacle of contemporary education. They transferred the filigree methods of Neoplatonic dialectics to current theological polemics. An excellent knowledge of ancient fiction was also a taken-for-granted norm in the circle.

The leader of the circle was Basil of Caesarea. Like all members of the circle, Vasily wrote a lot and skillfully; his literary activity is entirely subordinated to practical goals. His sermons formally stand at the level of the extremely developed rhetoric of this time - and at the same time, in their very essence they differ from the aesthetic eloquence of pagan sophists like Livanius. With Basil, as with the orators of the Greek classics during the times of Pericles and Demosthenes, the word again becomes an instrument of effective propaganda, persuasion, and influence on minds. It is characteristic that Vasily demanded that the listeners, not catching the meaning of his words, interrupt him at all costs and demand clarification: to be effective, the sermon must be intelligible. Of the pagan writers of late antiquity, Basil was greatly influenced by Plutarch with his practical psychologism; in particular, Plutarch's writings served as a model for Basil's treatise "On how young people can benefit from pagan books." This work has long served as an authoritative rehabilitation of the pagan classics; Even in the Renaissance, humanists referred to it in disputes with obscurantists.

Among Vasily’s “interpretations” of biblical texts, “Six Days” stands out - a cycle of sermons on the theme of the story of the creation of the world from the Book of Genesis. The combination of serious cosmological thoughts, entertaining material from late antique scholarship, and a very lively and heartfelt presentation made The Six Days a popular read in the Middle Ages. It gave rise to many translations, adaptations and imitations (including in ancient Russian literature).

Gregory of Nazianzus was for a long time the closest friend and collaborator of Basil of Caesarea, but it is difficult to imagine a person who would be less like this powerful politician than the refined, impressionable, nervous, self-absorbed Gregory. The same line divides their approach to literature: for Vasily, writing is a means of influencing others, for Gregory it is to express oneself.

Gregory's extensive legacy includes treatises on dogma (hence his nickname "Theologian"), rhetorical prose similar to the decorative style of Imeria, and letters. But its main significance lies in his poetic creativity. The stylistic range of Gregory's poetry is very wide. Closest to ancient examples are his numerous epigrams, distinguished by the intimacy of tone, softness, liveliness and transparency of intonation. Some of them do not allow one to guess that their author is one of the “church fathers.” Here, for example, is an epigram on the grave of a certain Martinian:

Muses' pet, vita, judge, excellent in everything
The glorious Martinian hid in my bosom.
He showed valor in sea battles, and courage in land battles,
Then he went to his grave without having tasted the sorrows.

His religious hymns have a completely different appearance, marked by stately impersonality and rhetorical sophistication: numerous anaphoras and syntactic parallelisms skillfully highlight their metrical structure and create a verse image reminiscent of the symmetrical arrangement of figures on Byzantine mosaics:

To her, the king, the imperishable king,
Through you our tunes,
Through you the heavenly choirs,
Time flows through you,
Through you the sun shines,
Through you the beauty of the constellations;
Through you the mortal is exalted
With a wondrous gift of understanding,
This makes him different from all creatures.

Along with this, Gregory’s poetry has at its disposal deeply personal motives of loneliness, disappointment, bewilderment at the cruelty and meaninglessness of life:

O bitter bondage! So I entered the world:
Who needs my torment for?
I say a frank word from my heart:
If I weren't yours, I would be indignant.
Let's be born; we come into the world; we spend our days;
We eat and drink, we wander, we sleep, we stay awake,
We laugh, we cry, pain torments the flesh,
The sun walks above us: this is how life goes,
And there you will rot in your grave. So is the dark beast
He lives in equal ignominy, but more innocent.

Gregory's generation could not yet accept a reassuring dogma from others - it had to first suffer through it. Therefore, Gregory’s world is full of difficult, vague, unresolved questions:

Who am I? Where did you come from? Where am I going? Don't know.
And I can't find anyone to guide me.

Gregory's lyrics capture with arresting immediacy the spiritual struggle that paid for the creation of church ideology:

Oh, what happened to me, true God,
Oh, what happened to me? Emptiness in the soul
All the sweetness of beneficent thoughts is gone,
And the heart, deadened in unconsciousness,
Ready to become the haven of the Prince of Abomination.

Three of Gregory’s poems are purely autobiographical in nature: “About my life”, “About my destiny” and “About the suffering of my soul”. It is possible that these poems, with their intimate psychologism and enormous culture of introspection, influenced the emergence of Augustine's Confessions.

The vast majority of Gregory's poems are subject to the laws of traditional musical versification, which Gregory mastered perfectly. It is all the more remarkable that we find in him two cases where the experience of tonic reform of prosody was completely consciously and consistently carried out (“Evening Hymn” and “Admonition to the Virgin”). This experiment is internally justified by the popular nature of both poems.

The third member of the circle, Gregory of Nyssa, is a master of philosophical prose. Gregory's worldview stands under the sign of a centuries-old tradition, going from the Pythagoreans through Plato to the Neoplatonists. Gregory's style, compared with the style of his companions, is somewhat ponderous, but it is precisely in the texts of the most speculative content that it reaches such sensitivity and expressiveness that even the most abstract thoughts are presented with plastic clarity. Gregory of Nyssa had a huge influence on medieval literature not only of Byzantium, but also of the Latin West with his allegorism.

The flourishing of rhetorical prose, passing through the entire 4th century, captured both pagan and Christian literature equally. But it reaches its culmination in the work of the church orator - the Antioch preacher John, nicknamed Chrysostom for his eloquence.

In his works, which vividly depict the social and religious life of the era, John Chrysostom angrily criticized the shortcomings of his contemporary society. Oratory skill and the brilliance of the Attic language were directed against the luxury of the imperial court and the corruption of the higher clergy. All this could not but cause discontent in the capital, as a result of which the bishop of Constantinople was deposed and sent into exile. Examples of Chrysostom's oratory are statements about spectacles that attracted people so much that the church was sometimes empty. “People are invited to spectacles every day, and no one is lazy, no one refuses, no one refers to the multitude of activities... everyone runs: neither the old man is ashamed of his gray hair, nor the young man is afraid of the flame of his natural lust, nor the rich man is afraid of humiliating his dignity". All this outrages the preacher, and he exclaims: “Am I really laboring in vain? Am I sowing on a rock or among thorns? If you go to the hippodrome, then “...they don’t pay attention to the cold, or the rain, or the distance of the journey. Nothing will keep them at home. But going to church - rain and mud become an obstacle for us!”

Meanwhile, nothing good comes from visiting the theater, for “... there you can see fornication and adultery, you can hear blasphemous speeches, so that the disease penetrates both through the eyes and through the ears...” And it is natural that “if you went to a spectacle and listened to prodigal songs, then you will certainly spew out the same words in front of your neighbor...”

The preaching of Christian morality was carried out from certain class positions. “People harmful to society,” wrote Chrysostom, “appear from among those who attend spectacles. From them comes indignation and rebellion. They most of all outrage the people and give rise to riots in the cities.”

The work of John Chrysostom, like some other authors of this turbulent era (for example, Julian the Apostate), is characterized by a feverish pace. Only those works of John that were included in the famous “Patrology” of Minh occupy 10 volumes; such productivity is especially surprising given the filigree rhetorical decoration. John's eloquence has a passionate, nervous, exciting character. This is how he addresses those who do not behave decently enough in church: “...You are a pitiful and unhappy person! You should have proclaimed the angelic praises with fear and trembling, but you bring here the customs of mimes and dancers! How are you not afraid, how are you not trembling when you begin to speak like this? Don’t you understand that the Lord himself is invisibly present here, measuring your movements, examining your conscience?...” John’s sermons are replete with topical allusions; when the empress threatened him with reprisals, he began his next sermon on the feast of John the Baptist with these words: “Again Herodias is raging, again going berserk, again dancing, demanding the head of John on a platter...” - and the listeners, of course, understood everything.

It is remarkable, however, that the focus on popularity did not stop John from following the canons of Atticism. The verbal fabric of his sermons is replete with reminiscences from Demosthenes, with whom, however, he was brought together not only by formal imitation, but also by internal congeniality: for all eight centuries, Demosthenes did not have more worthy heirs. Nevertheless, the virtuoso playing with classical turns, one must think, prevented John’s listeners from fully understanding him.

John Chrysostom was an unattainable ideal for every Byzantine preacher. The reader's perception of his works is well expressed by the inscription in the margins of one Greek manuscript kept in Moscow:

How wondrous is the brilliance of virtue,
Great John, from your soul,
All the power of God glorifying, poured out!
For this and golden eloquence
It's given to you. So have mercy on the sinner!
Az, poor Gordius, on the terrible day of judgment
May I be preserved by your prayer!

The Cappadocians and John Chrysostom brought Christian literature to a high degree of sophistication. But at the same time, other authors very productively developed other forms, more plebeian, alien to the academic style and language. Among them, it should be noted Palladius of Elenopolis (c. 364 - c. 430), the author of “Lavsaik”, or “Lavsian History” (named after a certain Lavs, to whom the book is dedicated). “Lavsaik” is a cycle of stories about Egyptian ascetics, among whom Palladius himself lived for a long time.

The main advantages of the book are a keen sense of everyday color and the folkloric spirit of the presentation. Classical reminiscences are unthinkable here; Even the kind of academicism that was still in the “Life of Anthony the Great,” compiled by Athanasius, left no trace here. The syntax is extremely primitive; as one can judge from the introductory parts of the book, written in a different texture, this primitiveness is to a large extent conscious. The conversational tone is very vividly imitated. Here is an example of the style of “Lavsaik”: “...When fifteen years had passed, a demon possessed the cripple and began to incite him against Eulogius; and the cripple began to blaspheme Evlogius with these words: “Oh, you, a selfish, prude, you hid extra money, but you want to save your soul on me? Drag me to the square! I want meat!” - Eulogius brought meat. And he again did his thing: “Not enough! I want people! I want to go to the square! Uh, rapist!” Palladius knew his heroes well, and for him they had not yet turned into impersonal personifications of monastic virtues. Of course, he reveres and loves them very much, seeing in their strange, often grotesque way of life the highest expression of holiness and spiritual strength; at the same time, he is far from devoid of a sense of restrained humor towards them. This combination of reverence and comedy, pious legend and businesslike reality makes Palladius’s monastic short stories a unique, attractive monument. They have their own personality.

Created by Palladius (undoubtedly, relying on predecessors unknown to us), the type of novelistic stories from the life of ascetics became extremely widespread in Byzantine literature. It also spread to other literature of the Christian Middle Ages: in Rus' such collections were called “patericons”; in Western Europe, for example, the famous “Fioretti” (“Flowers” ​​by Francis of Assisi, 13th century) goes back to this genre form.

Sinesius of Cyrene occupies a special place in the literary process of his era. First of all, it cannot be classified as either pagan or Christian literature. Sinesius was a highly educated descendant of a native Greek family, who traced themselves to Hercules; In him, his inner affinity with the ancient tradition reached such a degree of organicity as in none of his contemporary authors. More or less sincerely accepting the authority of Christianity, he sought to smooth out any contradiction between it and Hellenism: in his own words, the black cloak of a monk is equivalent to the white cloak of a sage. The need for social activity coming from antiquity forced him against his will to accept the rank of bishop, but he was never able to abandon his pagan sympathies and sentiments. Sinesius's literary activity is quite diverse. His letters, lively in tone and refined in style, served as an indisputable model for Byzantine epistolography: back in the 10th century. the author of “Svida” calls them “an object of general admiration,” and on the verge of the 13th and 14th centuries. Thomas Magister composes a detailed commentary on them. The speech “On Royal Power” - a kind of political program deployed by Sinesius before the Emperor Arcadius - is associated with topical issues, but spiritually and stylistically closer to the political moralization of the “second sophistry” than to the living trends of his time. In addition, from Synesius came: a kind of mythological “novel” with current political content - “Egyptian stories, or about providence”, an autobiographically colored treatise “Dono, or about life following his example” (about the author of the 1st-2nd centuries Dion Chrysostomos) , the rhetorical exercise “A Eulogy to a Bald Head,” several more speeches and religious hymns, marked by a colorful mixture of pagan and Christian images and thoughts. The metric of the hymns imitates the dimensions of ancient Greek lyrics, and the archaic nature of their vocabulary is complicated by the restoration of the ancient Doric dialect.

IV century was primarily an age of prose; he gave only one great poet - Gregory of Nazianzus. In the 5th century there is a revival of poetry. Already on the threshold of this century stands Sinesius with his hymns, but the most important event in the literary life of the era was the activity of the Egyptian school of epic poets.

Almost nothing is known about the life of the founder of this school, Nonna from the Egyptian city of Panopolis. He was born around 400 and towards the end of his life became a bishop. There are two more from his works: huge in volume (48 books - like the Iliad and Odyssey combined) the poem “The Acts of Dionysus” and “Arrangement of St. Gospel of John." Both the poem and the transcription are written in hexameters. In terms of material, they sharply contrast with each other: pagan mythology dominates in the poem, Christian mysticism dominates in the transcription. But stylistically they are quite homogeneous. Nonnus is equally inaccessible to the plastic simplicity of Homer and the artless simplicity of the Gospel: his artistic vision of the world is characterized by eccentricity and an excess of tension. His forte is rich imagination and exciting pathos; his weakness is the lack of measure and integrity. Often, Nonnus’s images completely fall out of their context and take on an autonomous life, frightening with their mystery and dark significance. This is how he describes the death of Christ:

Someone with a fierce spirit
A sponge that grew in the abyss of the sea, in the incomprehensible abyss,
He took it and abundantly saturated it with painful moisture, and then
He strengthened it on the tip of the reed and raised it high;
So he brought mortal bitterness to the lips of Jesus,
Right in front of his face, he swayed on a long pole,
There is a sponge high in the air and pouring moisture into the mouth...
...Then the larynx and lips felt the bitterest moisture;
All dying, he said the last word: “It is finished!” —
And, bowing his head, he surrendered to his voluntary death...

Nonnus carried out an important reform of the hexameter, which boils down to the following: the exclusion of verse movements that made it difficult to perceive size in the state of the living Greek language that existed by the 5th century; taking into account, along with musical stress, also tonic stress; a tendency towards the unification of caesura and pedantic smoothness of verse, justified by the fact that the hexameter has finally hardened in its academic and museum quality (starting from the 6th century, traditionalist epic gradually abandoned the hexameter and switched to iambics). Nonna's hexameter is an attempt to find a compromise between traditional school prosody and live speech in ways of complicating versification.

A number of poets who developed the mythological epic and mastered the new metrical technique experienced the influence of Nonna. Many among them are Egyptians, like Nonnus himself (Kollufus, Trifiodorus, Cyrus of Panopolis, Christodorus of Koptos); the origin of Musaeus is unknown, from whom came the epillium “Hero and Leander”, marked by the ancient clarity and transparency of the figurative system. Cyrus owns, by the way, an epigram on Daniel the Stylite, where Homeric sayings are curiously applied to the description of the Christian ascetic:

Behold, between earth and sky a man stands motionless,
Substituting your flesh to all the demons of the winds.
His name is Daniel. Competing with Simeon in labor,
He accomplished the feat of the pillar, his foot rooted to the stone.
He feeds on ambrosial hunger and imperishable thirst,
Trying to glorify the Most Pure Virgin Child.

Christodore is already on the verge of the 5th and 6th centuries. composed a poetic description (the genre of ekphrasis, fashionable in this era) of ancient statues from one of the capital’s gymnasiums. Here is a description of the statue of Demosthenes:

The appearance was not calm: the brow betrayed concern,
In the heart of the wise, deep thoughts turned in succession
It was as if he were gathering in his mind a thunderstorm against the heads of the Emathians.
Soon, soon, angry speeches will come from the lips,
And the lifeless brass will sound!.. But no, it is indestructible
Art closed its mute lips with a strict seal.

But the most talented poet of the turn of the 5th and 6th centuries. stands outside the school of Nonna: this is the Alexandrian Pallas, who worked in the genre of epigram. The dominant tone of Pallas's lyrics is courageous but hopeless irony: his hero is a mendicant scholar who defends himself against the hardships of poverty and family life with sarcasm (complaints about financial difficulties and an evil wife become a popular commonplace in Byzantine lyrics).

The poet's sympathies are on the side of vanishing antiquity. With sadness he realizes the inevitability of the death of the old world close to him. He mourns the fallen statue of Hercules:

I saw the bronze son of Zeus in the dust of the crossroads;
Before they prayed to him, but now they have cast him into dust.
And the shocked one said: “O Three-Mooned One, guardian of evil,
Hitherto invincible, by whom are you defeated, tell me?”
At night, appearing before me, God said to me, smiling:
“I am God,” and yet I have learned the power of time over myself.”

Christianity is alien to Pallas, and undisguised sad irony is heard in his poem “To Marina’s House”:

The gods of Olympus have now become Christians in the house
They live carelessly in this, because the flames are not dangerous for them here,
The flame feeding the crucible where the copper is melted into a coin.

Justinian's restoration policy to some extent contributed to the strengthening of the classicist trend in literary life. The situation was contradictory to the point of paradox: Justinian cruelly persecuted deviations from Christian ideology, but in literature he encouraged the formal language that was borrowed from the pagan classics. Therefore, in the middle of the 6th century. two genres flourish: historiography, living by the pathos of Roman statehood, and the epigram, living by the pathos of culture inherited from antiquity.

The most significant historian of this era is Procopius, whose successor was Agathius of Myrinea. Agathius also worked in another leading genre of that time - the epigram genre.

An epigram is a form of lyrical miniature that requires a particularly high level of external decoration. This is precisely why it attracts the poets of the Justinian era, who seek to demonstrate the refinement of their taste and their familiarity with classical examples. Epigrams are written by many: along with the great masters - Agathius, Paul the Silentiary, Julian of Egypt, Macedonia, Eratosthenes Scholasticus - there is a legion of imitators: Leontius Scholasticus, Arabia Scholasticus, Leo, Damocharides of Kos, John Barvukal and others. According to social status, these are either courtiers (Paul - “guardian of silence” at the court of Justinian, Julian - prefect of Egypt, Macedonia - consular), or brilliant capital lawyers (Agathias, Eratosthenes, Leontius). Here is one of Julian’s epigrams - a compliment expressed in verse to the Empress’s relative John:

A. Glorious, mighty John! B. But mortal. A. Royal wife
In-laws! B. Mortal, add. A. Royal family escape!
B. The kings themselves are mortal. A. Fair! B. Only this is immortal
In it: one virtue is stronger than death and fate.

In the epigrammatics of Justinian's era, conventional classical motifs predominate; only sometimes a touch of sentimentality or erotic poignancy betrays the advent of a new era. The court poets of the emperor, who diligently uprooted the remnants of paganism, refined their talent on stereotypical themes: “Offering to Aphrodite,” “Offering to Dionysus,” etc.; when they take on a Christian topic, they turn it into a mind game. Paul the Silentiary had to sing, by order of the emperor, to the newly built St. Sophia: he begins the most winning part of his graceful ekphrasis - the description of the night illumination of the dome - with the mythological image of Phaeton (the son of Helios, who tried to drive his solar chariot):

Everything here breathes beauty, you will marvel at everything
Your eye. But tell me, with what radiant radiance
The temple is illuminated at night, and the word is powerless. You say:
A certain night Phaeton poured this brilliance onto the shrine!..

An anonymous epigram glorifying another great creation of the Justinian era - the codification of legislation carried out under the leadership of Tribonian - also operates with mythological images:

Justinian the ruler conceived this work;
Tribonian worked on it, pleasing the ruler,
As if creating a valuable shield for the power of Hercules,
Wonderfully decorated with the cunning embossing of wise laws.
Everywhere - in Asia, in Libya, in vast Europe
The nations listen to the king that he has laid down the rules for the universe.

Anacreontic poetry is also adjacent to epigrammatics, characterized by the same features - an imitation of pagan hedonism,

standardization of subject matter and refinement of technology. Here are verses for the pagan holiday of the rose, belonging to John the Grammar (first half of the 6th century):

Here Zephyr blew with warmth,
And he opened up, I note,
And the color of Harita laughs,
And the meadows are colorful.

And Eros with a skillful arrow
A sweet desire awakens
To the greedy mouth of oblivion
Didn't devour the human race.

The sweetness of the lyre, the beauty of the song
Summon Dionysus
Announcing the spring holiday
And they breathe the wise Muse...

Give me the Cythera flower,
Bees, wise songbirds,
I will praise the rose with a song:
Smile at me, Cypris!

This artificial poetry, playing with outdated mythology, superficial cheerfulness and bookish eroticism, does not cease to exist in subsequent centuries of Byzantine literature (especially after the 11th century), paradoxically adjacent to the motives of monastic mysticism and asceticism.

However, in the same VI century. A completely different poetry arises, corresponding to such organic manifestations of the new aesthetics as the Church of St. Sofia. Liturgical poetry, folk in spirit, after all the experiments and searches of the 4th-5th centuries. suddenly acquires the fullness of maturity in the work of Roman, nicknamed by his descendants the Sweet Singer (born at the end of the 5th century, died after 555). The naturalness and confidence with which Roman worked seemed like a miracle to his contemporaries; According to legend, the Mother of God herself opened his mouth in a night dream, and the next morning he ascended to the pulpit and sang his first hymn.

Already by its origin, Roman has nothing to do with the memories of ancient Greece: he is a native of Syria, perhaps a baptized Jew. Before settling in Constantinople, he served as a deacon in one of the churches of Beirut. Syrian verse and musical skills helped him renounce the dogmas of school prosody and switch to tonics, which alone could create a metrical organization of speech intelligible to the Byzantine ear. The novel created the form of the so-called kontakion - a liturgical poem consisting of an introduction, which should emotionally prepare the listener, and no less than 24 stanzas. That looseness, which for the first time in the history of Greek liturgical lyricism appears in Roman, allowed him to achieve enormous productivity; According to sources, he wrote about a thousand kontakia. Currently, about 85 Roman kontakia are known (the attribution of some is questionable).

Having abandoned retrospective metrical norms, the Roman had to sharply increase the role of such verse factors as alliteration, assonance and rhyme. This entire set of technical means existed in traditional Greek literature, but was always the property of rhetorical prose; The novel transferred it to poetry, creating in some of its kontakia a type of verse that will evoke in the Russian reader clear associations with folk “spiritual poems” (and sometimes with the so-called raeshnik). Here are two examples (from the kontakions “On the Betrayal by Judas” and “On the Dead”):

God, who washes our feet with waters
To the organizer of your destruction,
Filling your mouth with bread
To the desecrator of your blessing,
To the traitor of your kiss, -
You have elevated the poor with wisdom,
He caressed the poor man with wisdom,
Gifted and blessed
A demonic game!..

The unmarried man repents in sadness,
The married man strains himself in the bustle;
The endless one is tormented by sorrows,
We have many children and are consumed by worries;
Those in marriage are consumed by labor,
Those in celibacy are tormented by despair...

With this richness of the language of forms, the novel combines the people's integrity of emotions, naivety and sincerity of moral assessments. The kontakion about Judas ends with this stunning appeal to the traitor:

Oh, slow down, you unfortunate one, come to your senses,
Think, madman, of retribution!
Conscience will bind and destroy the sinner,
And in horror, in agony, having come to his senses,
You will give yourself up to a vile death.
The tree will stand over you as a destroyer,
He will reward you in full and without pity.
And what, money-lover, were you flattered by?
You will throw away terrible gold,
You will destroy your vile soul,
And you can’t help yourself with silver,
Selling an incorruptible treasure!..

As unexpected as it may seem, Roman’s poetry, purely religious in its themes, speaks much more about the real life of his

time than the too academic secular poetry of the era of Justinian. In the kontakion “On the Dead,” with great internal regularity, images of the reality that worried Roman’s plebeian listeners appear:

The rich man abuses the poor man,
Devours the orphan and the weak;
The farmer's labor is the master's profit,
Sweat for some, luxury for others,
And the poor man strains himself in his labors,
So that everything will be taken away and dispelled!..

Roman’s work contains motifs and images that most adequately expressed the emotional world of medieval man. Therefore, we find in him the prototypes of not only many works of later Byzantine hymnography (for example, the “Great Canon” of Andrew of Crete), but also two of the most famous hymns of the Western Middle Ages - Dies irae and Stabat mater.

Roman Sladkopevets far exceeded his contemporaries in the scale of his artistic talent, but he was not alone. From the era of Justinian and his successors, many poetic and prosaic works have come down that, in an artless and unpretentious manner, but with great organicity, expressed the Byzantine style of life and worldview.

The plebeian figurative system is for the most part distinguished by the vast literature of prose or versified monastic teachings. John the Faster, Patriarch of Constantinople, hardly considered himself a poet, but his “Instructions for a Monk” in iambic trimetres are arresting with their rough vitality:

Don’t you dare disdain food alone,
Others you choose at your whim;
And whoever is squeamish, we will also be squeamish...
...Chat and gossip run away like a scourge:
They plunge the heart into mortal defilement.
Don't you dare spit in the middle of the meal,
And if the need has fallen so much that there is no urine,
Hold back, quickly go out and clear your throat.
O man, do you want to eat and drink?
There is no sin in that. But beware of satiety!
There is a dish in front of you, eat from it,
Don’t you dare reach across the table, don’t be greedy!..

These verses are characterized, by the way, by their iambic form: of the traditional classical meters, the iambic trimeter is adopted by Byzantine poetry with the greatest organicity. At the same time, its musical prosody is increasingly ignored, and it is reinterpreted as a pure syllabic; the minimum level of structure is maintained in these equal lines by the fact that the last tonic stress in the verse certainly falls on the penultimate syllable (thus, when we call these verses iambics and translate them accordingly, this is a pure convention - but the Byzantines themselves adhered to this convention). Gradually, the epic moves from the academic forms of elegiac distich to iambics.

Official propaganda, in order to influence the people, was itself forced to adopt plebeian, semi-folklore forms, without which it could no more do than without the impressive verses of court poets. Even in the Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman Empire, the custom of choral recitation or recitative chanting of rhythmically designed loyal greetings to the sovereign was widespread. This custom received particular development and complication in the cumbersome ritual of Byzantine court festivities, in which crowds of people were also involved in the role of extras. Here is the text for choral performance at the spring festival - here the folklore basis is revealed especially clearly:

Once again a beautiful spring comes to our joy,
Bringing joy, health, life, fun and good luck.
Carrying strength from God as a gift to the Roman ruler
And victory over enemies by the will of God!

Similar texts were sung at the holidays of accessions, coronations, weddings of emperors, at Easter celebrations, etc. But formally close to them, popular reproaches and ridicule were also in great use, with which the Byzantine crowd showered those in power during unrest and uprisings.

The wide readership of Byzantium received its own historiography in this era. The works of Procopius or Agathias, with their intellectual and linguistic sophistication, were incomprehensible to the average reader; for him a purely medieval form of folk-monastic chronicle is created.

We have already spoken above about the folk character of ascetic edifying literature. The folkloric tone is especially characteristic of the famous “Ladder” of the Sinai monk John (c. 525 - c. 600), nicknamed “The Ladder” after his main work. “The Ladder”, in a simple and relaxed language, sets out the prescriptions of harsh ascetic morality, interspersed with confidential stories about personal experiences and equipped with colorful proverbs and sayings. John approaches the duty of an ascetic with popular frankness and ingenuity; he is alien to pretentious monastic mysticism. The translation of “The Ladder” has been known in Rus' since the 11th century. and enjoyed enormous popularity. Another type of ascetic literature, characterized by greater sophistication of psychological introspection and the cult of contemplation, was represented in the same era by Isaac the Syrian: his “Words of Instruction” (compiled in Syriac and soon translated into Greek) speak of “tenderness”, of “amazement at one’s own beauty.” souls." In Rus', Isaac has been read since the 14th century; there is reason to think that his “Words of Instruction” were known to Andrei Rublev and influenced his work.

Hagiographic literature also belongs to this circle of monuments. An outstanding hagiographer of the 6th century, one of the creators of the hagiographic canon, was Cyril of Scythopolis. The exact years of his life are unknown: his year of birth is approximately 524. Thanks to his father, who was a lawyer, Kirill received a good education, although he did not learn rhetoric, which he himself regrets. In 543, being a monk, he entered the monastery of St. Euthymius, then moved to the monastery of St. Savva.

A keen interest in the illustrious founders of the monasteries of Palestine prompted him to collect more accurate information about their lives. At the same time, he created images of other Palestinian monks, which was of considerable importance for the history of the church and monasteries of Palestine.

Kirill was not a professional writer, but the lives he wrote served as a guide for his followers. His works were distinguished by chronological accuracy and simple presentation. They contained valuable historical facts, such as information about Arab tribes. A significant role was also played by the fact that Kirill was a contemporary of his heroes, which made it possible to present them against a real cultural and historical background.

Social and political cataclysms of the 7th century. contributed to the vulgarization of literature that had already begun in previous centuries.

Classical traditions become meaningless; the experience of the continuity of power and culture, dating back to ancient times, ceases to be relevant. Refined imitation of ancient samples is finding fewer and fewer readers. Moreover, within the framework of the specific spiritual situation of the early Middle Ages, the vulgarization of literature inevitably had to result in its sacralization; the proportion of genres related to the life and needs of the church and monastery is greatly increasing. Folk monastic forms, pushed aside in the 6th century. to the periphery of the literary process find themselves in the center.

The last echo of the “high” secular poetry of the 6th century. there was the work of George Pisis (a nickname from the name of the Asia Minor region of Pisidia, where George was from), Chartophylak under Heraclius. It is far from accidental that George worked precisely during the era of Heraclius: this reign was the last light before the difficult decades of the Arab onslaught, and it might have seemed to his contemporaries that the times of Justinian were returning. It was to the military operations of his royal patron that George dedicated his large epic poems: “On the campaign of King Heraclius against the Persians”, “On the Avar invasion with an account of the battle under the walls of Constantinople between the Avars and the townspeople” and “Heracliade, or on the final death of Khosrov, the king of Persia” . In addition, George wrote less significant poems of moralistic and religious content; Among them, “The Sixth Day, or the Creation of the World” stands out, testifying to the outstanding erudition of Pisis in ancient literature. Translations of “Shestodnev” were in circulation in Armenia, Serbia and Rus'. George Pisida also wrote iambic epigrams.
Pisis's historical works are particularly interesting. The central image of the heroic epic is the emperor, surrounded by an aura of military glory and valor. The poet acts as a singer of the glory of Heraclius. Despite the tendentiousness, rhetorical style and mannerisms of expression, these works reflect the difficulty of the external situation of the empire in the first half of the 7th century. and important factual data.

Pisida's work attracts attention because of its retrospective nature and the school-like correctness of its metrics. Most of his works are performed in iambics, which, unlike his contemporaries, correspond to the norms of musical prosody. He achieves such virtuosity in his use of the iambic trimeter that he prompted the subtle connoisseur Michael Psellus (11th century) to seriously discuss the problem in a special treatise: “Who constructs verse better - Euripides or Pisis?” Sometimes he resorts to hexameter; in these cases he scrupulously observes the prosodic restrictions of the Nonna school. Pisis's figurative system is distinguished by great clarity and a sense of proportion, which also make us recall classical examples.

And yet Pisis went much further from antiquity than the court poets of Justinian. We find in him an image of Fate, designed in the spirit of the purest medieval allegorism and forcing us to recall dozens of parallels from Vagant poetry or book miniatures of the Middle Ages:

Imagine in your mind an obscene dancer,
Which is acting with noise and antics.
Depicting the vicissitudes of existence
The deceptive flash of fussy hands.
The disgraceful woman is thrilled, spinning, simpering,
Winking languidly and seductively
To the one whom she decided to fool,
But immediately on another and a third
He still turns his gaze with the same prodigal caress.
He promises everything, he tries to fake everything
And nothing creates reliable,
Like a slut with a cold soul
Approaches everyone with feigned fervor...

The medieval allegory is necessarily followed by a characteristic edification:

To fools - thrones, kingdoms, glory, honors,
Inseparable with malice and care;
But for those who have managed to comprehend the truth,
The throne is prayer, glory is quiet speech...

Yet the poetry of Pisis, with its secular orientation, linguistic purism and metrical correctness, stands out sharply against the background of the literary production of its era. A few generations later it would already be an anachronism.

More promising was the line of liturgical poetry that Roman Sladkopevets discovered. A contemporary and friend of George Pisis was Patriarch Sergius (610-638); under his name came the most famous work of Greek hymnography - the “Great Akathist” to the Virgin Mary. This attribution is doubtful: the poem was attributed to Romanus, Patriarch Herman and even Pisis. One thing is obvious: at least the introductory part of the akathist was created immediately after the invasion of the Avars in 626. The form of the akathist involves an endless escalation of appeals and epithets, beginning with the same greeting (in the traditional Russian translation, “Rejoice”). The lines are connected in pairs by strict metric and syntactic parallelism, supported by the widest use of assonance and rhyme:

Rejoice, receptacle of God's wisdom,
Rejoice, storehouse of the Lord's mercy,
Rejoice, flower of continence,
Rejoice, wreath of chastity,
Rejoice, thou who overcomest the wiles of hell,
Rejoice, thou who openest the doors of heaven...

Translation can only give an extremely impoverished idea of ​​this poetic structure, based on the most complex play of thoughts, words and sounds; This game cannot be played within another language. The flexibility and virtuosity of verbal ornamentation reaches the highest degree in The Great Akathist. But the movement, the dramatic gradation of tension that can still be found in Roman’s kontakia, is not here. This does not mean that the poem is monotonous or monotonous. On the contrary, she plays with the greatest variety of shades of vocabulary and euphony, but this variety is akin to the variegation of arabesques: there is no dynamics behind it. In general, the poem is static to an extent that would be unbearable for any reader and listener except the Byzantine (this is by no means a common feature of liturgical poetry - in all works of Western medieval hymnography, which in their artistic level can withstand comparison with the “Great Akathist”, there is always internal development).

Meanwhile, we see that the author was able to convey the movement of human emotion quite convincingly: in the inserted parts framing the stanzas, he depicts Mary’s embarrassment in front of her fate, Joseph’s bewilderment, etc. But it is characteristic that these sketches and sketches lie on the periphery of the artistic whole. Byzantine aesthetics required the hymnographer to be static. In the words of John Climacus. one who has achieved moral perfection “is likened to a motionless column in the depths of his heart”; It is impossible to imagine a greater contrast to the Gothic understanding of spirituality as dynamic tension. In its static nature, “The Great Akathist” is an exact correlate of works of Byzantine painting. It ideally suits the rhythm of the liturgical “action” of the Greek liturgy, the intonations of Byzantine music (which are also static), and the outlines of the church interior, filled with the flickering of candles and the glitter of mosaics. Here the same integral unity of poetic text and architectural space has been achieved as once in the Attic theater of the era of Sophocles.

Continuers of the hagiographic traditions of the 6th century. there were John Moschus, Sophronius of Jerusalem, Leontius of Naples. They all belonged to the same circle, which was characterized, on the one hand, by the desire to bring literature closer to the people, and on the other, by a break from antiquity.

The Palestinian monk John Moschus (died in 619), who made numerous trips to Egypt, Asia Minor, Syria, Sinai and Cyprus, compiled, as a result of his travels, together with his friend, Sophronius of Jerusalem, a collection of stories about monks “The Spiritual Meadow ", or "Limonar". This work is distinguished by its simplicity of plot, realism, and vivid characterization. Limonar was a considerable success and was repeatedly reworked and expanded.

John Moschus and Sophronius jointly wrote a biography of John the Merciful, intended for an educated circle. In such lives, intended for representatives of the upper class of Byzantine society, the authors sought to show their erudition: familiarity with ancient literature, knowledge of rhetoric; however, they often lost their originality.

The most prominent figure of democratic hagiography of the 7th century. there was Leontius from Naples on the island of Cyprus (late 6th - mid 7th century). His compositions are distinguished by a rare liveliness of tone; at the same time, he is brought closer to his genre predecessor Palladius by the fact that he does not avoid humorous assessments in his lives. This is what he says about the holy fool. Simeone: “...On one street the girls were dancing in circles with choruses, and the saint decided to walk along this street. And so they saw him and began to tease the holy father with their refrains. The righteous man made a prayer in order to bring them to their senses, and through his prayer they all immediately became dumb... Then they began to chase him with tears and shout: “Take back the word, blessed one, take back the word,” because they believed that he had let go there is a squint on them like a fortune-telling. And so they caught up with him, stopped him by force and begged him to unleash his spell. And he said to them with a grin: “Whichever of you wants to be healed, I will kiss that squinted eye, and it will be healed.” And then everyone who was the will of God to be healed was allowed to kiss their eye; and the rest, who did not succeed, remained dumbfounded and crying...” The episode ends with the holy fool’s maxim: “If the Lord had not sent squint to them, they would have turned out to be the greatest disgraces in all of Syria, but because of the illness of their eyes, they were saved from many evils." The life of the Alexandrian Archbishop John the Merciful, with whom Leontius had a personal friendship, is distinguished by a more serious, but equally vital character. Leonty portrays his hero as an active lover of humanity, whose heightened conscience does not allow him to enjoy the luxury appropriate to his rank: “...Can one say that John is covered with a cover of thirty-six gold coins, while his brothers in Christ are numb and cold? How many at this very moment are chattering their teeth from the cold, how many have only a straw at their disposal; They lay half of it down, cover themselves with half and can’t stretch their legs - they’re just shaking, curled up in a ball! How many go to bed in the mountains, without food, without a candle, and suffer doubly from hunger and cold!..”

Literature of Byzantium IV-VII centuries. reflects the formation and establishment of Christian culture, accompanied by the struggle against the echoes of pagan antiquity. In this complex and contradictory struggle between two ideologies, new genres and styles were born, which were developed in the subsequent era. 

From the second half of the 9th century. Byzantine society enters a period of stabilization. The new Macedonian dynasty (from 867) establishes a relatively strong centralized regime. Cities rising from decline replace monasteries as cultural centers; The importance of secular elements of culture is increasing again. After a three-century break, interest in classical antiquity is renewed, propagated by such scholars as Patriarch Photius (c. 820 - c. 891), his student Arethas (c. 860 - after 932) and Arethas' enemy Leo Chirosfactus (IX-X centuries). The revival of philological interests is colorfully evidenced by the epigram of a certain Comita, characteristic not only for its content, but also for the correctness of its prosody:

Comita found the manuscript of Homer,

Unusable, without punctuation;

Having sat down to work, he diligently straightened everything out,

From now on, for diligent scribes

The manual is ready and reliable.

(Translation by S. Averintsev)

Patriarch Photius, the most prominent church and political figure of his time, who experienced both power and exile, the initiator of the division of the Orthodox

and Catholic churches, found time in his hectic life to make detailed notes about the old pagan and Christian books he came across. This is how he analyzes Livaniy’s style: “This writer is more useful for study in his speeches, written for exercise and on fictitious occasions, than in others. The fact is that in the latter, excessive and immoderate finishing destroyed the spontaneous - if I may say so, unconscious - charm of the style and led to unintelligibility, resulting either from unnecessary additions or from abbreviations that harm the very essence. With all this, and in these speeches of his, he is the measure and pillar of Attic eloquence.” Thus Photius annotates 280 different works; the collection of these records is called the Myriobiblion, or Library. Like the members of his circle, the patriarch combined academic studies with poetry.

The poetic gift is evidenced by the poems of Arefa, a philologist, politician and bishop of Caesarea, to whom, by the way, we owe the best surviving lists of texts by Plato, Euclid, Lucian and other classical authors, copied on his order from unique manuscripts. This polymath turned to the long-abandoned form of the epigram in elegiac distichs.

Leo the Philosopher was a scientist and poet (beginning of the 10th century). This courtier of Emperor Leo the Wise wrote a number of epigrams on purely bookish topics (about Archytas, about Plato, about Aristotle, about Porphyry, about Aristotelian definitions, etc.). His Anacreontic poem for the wedding of Leo the Wise is replete with ancient reminiscences: the emperor’s bride is “the new dear Penelope,” the poet glorifies her and the groom on the “lyre of Orpheus,” while invoking “luminiferous Helios.”

Court life of Byzantium in the 10th century. captured in a monument that has to be mentioned for its value not so much in historical-literary, but in historical-cultural terms: this is a treatise known under the title “On Ceremonies” (the title of the original is “Explanation of the Imperial Ceremonial”) and attributed to Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenet (Porphyrogenitus, reigned 913-959). The attribution of this codification of the rituals of the court of Constantinople to the royal author is doubtful, but the monument undoubtedly belongs to the 10th century. (more like the 2nd half), although it includes a lot of earlier material. The aesthetics of ceremony, so important for Byzantine life and for Byzantine art, found here a convincing expression: if the imperial power, as the introduction says, appears in the decoration of “proper rhythm and order,” the empire truly reflects the harmonious movement of the cosmos created by God.

After several generations of epigrammatists-versifiers at the turn of the 10th and 11th centuries. a real poet appears who manages to combine the brilliance of the traditional form with creative individuality: this is John Kiriot, nicknamed the “Geometer” for his mathematical studies. John held the court position of protospatharius and lived with the political passions of his time, although towards the end of his life he became a priest and achieved the rank of metropolitan. His epigrams are characterized by the ancient harmony of the figurative system:

Life and the seas of the abyss are similar: salty bitterness,

Monsters, swells and darkness; There is short peace in the harbor.

The sea is given to escape; but for everyone the demon will erect

The storms of the world are, alas, much more terrible than those of the sea.

(Translation by S. Averintsev)

A blameless husband must keep sacred three blessings:

In your heart - purity; quiet modesty in the eyes;

Restraint is in calm speech. Who has observed and learned everything,

Much richer, believe me, is Croesus of Lydia.

(Translation by S. Averintsev)

A funny example of wordplay in medieval taste is the couplet “On the Wine,” where each word of the first line is contrasted with the same member of the list in the second line (the same poems were composed in the medieval West):

You are courage, youth, vigor, treasure, fatherland:

For cowards, old people, frail, beggars, outcasts.

(Translation by S. Averintsev)

Beginning of the 11th century was marked by a wave of monastic reaction against the worldly, anti-crisis tendencies of Byzantine culture. It was this time that gave birth to one of the most prominent mystics of Byzantium, to whom tradition assigned the honorary title of “New Theologian,” thereby equating him with the Apostle John the Theologian and the father of the church Gregory the Theologian, Simeon (949-1022). In the poetry of Symeon the New Theologian, glorifying the self-deepening of the ascetic, the characteristic Byzantine mysticism of light reaches its utmost development:

I'm sitting in my cell

All day, all night.

And with me love is invisible,

Incomprehensibly dwells:

Outside of things, outside of every creature,

But in everything and in every thing,

It’s like heat, like a flame in brilliance,

Just like a luminous cloud,

In the end - the glory of the sun...

(Translation by S. Averintsev)

In the worldview, in the religious and philosophical aspect, Simeon is a traditionalist; he not only strictly accepts all the traditions of monastic mysticism, but is connected by hidden threads with ancient Neoplatonism, with the late antique experience of the inner light of spirituality. But on the literary plane, he cared little about the classical traditions revived by book poetry. Simeon introduces into poetry a common folk meter, which had a great future ahead of it - the iambic fifteen-syllable, the so-called political verse (“political” means “common”).

But the time when creativity outside of classicist norms was conceivable only in the mainstream of church and monastic literature was coming to an end precisely in the era of Simeon. By the 10th century There is a renewal of Byzantine folklore, re-mastering the military-heroic theme. The prerequisite for these shifts in folk art was the strengthening of the military-feudal nobility and the social significance of war in the context of successful wars with the Arabs from the first victories of Vasily I (867-886) to the capture of Edessa by George Maniac in 1032. A new ideal of a cheerful young warrior was being developed for Byzantium , of course, devoted to the Orthodox faith, but in a purely worldly manner, without a shadow of monastic humility, and ready to speak as an equal even with the emperor himself. Songs glorifying such brave men were already sung at the turn of the 9th-10th centuries: the above-mentioned student of Photius Arefas of Caesarea complains about the abundance of storytellers whose common folk tunes offended his refined taste. Apparently, the song “About the Son of Armuris”, preserved in a manuscript of the 14th-15th centuries, dates back to this era. This medieval Greek epic is inspired by the inspiration of revenge taken in the wars with the Arabs. Its plot is briefly as follows: young Armuris, the son of the knight Armuris, who has been languishing in Arab captivity for twenty years, asks his mother to let him go “on the run”; he proves his strength by bending his father’s heroic bow, and sets off on his father’s reserved horse. Having crossed the Euphrates and seeing the Saracen army, in the name of knightly honor he refuses a surprise attack:

The fellow thinks, thinks, says:

“I won’t go against the unarmed, otherwise they will refer me to

That I caught them unarmed, and there is little honor in this.”

“To arms, you filthy Saracen dogs,

Hurry up, put on your armor, hurry up and saddle your horses,

Don’t hesitate, don’t think: Armuris is in front of you,

Armouris, son of Armouris, brave warrior!”

(Translation by M. Gasparov)

The battle itself is described in the everyday formulas of the heroic epic:

And the gloriously brave one cuts, the bravely brave one fights:

He hits to the right, he hits to the left, and he drives the middle ones.

I swear by the kind sun king and the sun king mother,

All day long, from dawn to dusk, he beats them up the river,

All night from dawn to dawn he beats them down the river:

Whoever he struck down, whoever he pierced, no one came out alive.

(Translation by M. Gasparov)

Thus, young Armuris destroys the entire army of the emir; the only Saracen who managed to hide in time steals the hero's horse and club and arrives with them to the emir. Armouris the father, languishing in captivity, sees a horse and a club and becomes alarmed for his son (who, meanwhile, managed to reach Syria in pursuit of the thief), but the surviving Saracen tells about what happened; The emir frees his father and asks his son for peace, offering him his daughter as his wife. The cheerful tone of this short (201 verses) heroic song is maintained very seamlessly. Its historical symbolism - the son's revenge for the defeat of his father - is associated with the mood of the first victories over the hitherto invincible Arabs.

A much more significant monument in volume and interesting in content of the Byzantine heroic epic is the famous poem “Digenis Akrit”, which has survived in a number of versions. In this case, we are dealing with the processing of folklore material under the influence of the norms of scientific poetry. The original version apparently dates back to the end of the 10th - beginning of the 11th century; a number of strata in the surviving versions indicate different eras from the second half of the 11th century to the 14th century. Digenis (Greek: “Twice-born”) is already connected with the East by his origin: he is the son of a Greek woman and a Syrian emir who was baptized out of love for her. As befits a hero, Digenis already in childhood performs great feats: he strangles a bear with his bare hands, breaks the back of a bear, and cuts off the head of a lion with a blow of a sword. Growing up, he fights with the popularly known robbers of the Greek mountains, the “appelates.” He also obtains a bride for himself with a sword; after the wedding, valuing his independence, he retires to the border regions of the state and becomes an akrit (akrits -

free landowners-warriors who settled on the border and pledged to defend it).

When Digenis is summoned by the emperor, the hero politely but decisively declines the invitation, citing the fact that one of the royal servants might, due to inexperience, speak to him inappropriately, and then, alas, he will have to, to his own regret, reduce the number of the sovereign of people. The emperor accepts Digenis's reasons and comes to him himself to listen to instructions on how to rule the state. Then alternate descriptions of heroic exploits and erotic episodes of a rather crude nature, in which, however, Digenis is endowed with features that make one remember his pagan predecessor, Hercules; but unlike Hercules, Digenis is a Christian, and therefore after each fall he invariably feels guilty, which destroys the integrity of his epic-heroic appearance, but at the same time gives him humanity. This is followed by a description of the magnificent palace of Digenis, maintained in the literary traditions of rhetoric, and a story about the death of Digenis's parents, then himself and his wife. The plot of “Digenis Akrit” reveals a number of parallels with the Arabic story about Omar ibn an-Naum from the tales of “A Thousand and One Nights” and with the Turkish epic about Said-Battal; there is no need to assume the dependence of one folklore monument on another - it is much more important to understand the typological proximity between the cultural environment that gave birth to the Byzantine poem and the Muslim world of the same era. The analogies can be even broader. The turbulent life on the border of confessional regions, which created contradictory relations between peoples on both sides of the border, was reflected in the poem, as in the Spanish-Moorish romancero of the 14th-16th centuries. or in the heroic epic of the South Slavs and Oguz-Seljuk written monuments about the border service.

Social conditions and popular interests depended little on state and religious boundaries. This is entirely consistent with the amazing benevolence with which the Digenis Akritos speaks of non-believers.

The characters in the poem often and willingly pray, and their words sound sincere and heartfelt, but there is no fanaticism in their faith; When Digenis's mother's brothers talk to the emir, who has not yet converted to a Muslim, they wish him in respectful terms to see the tomb of Mohammed. The absence of hatred towards people of other faiths is one of the most gratifying features of the epic of Digenis, almost as unusual for Byzantine literature as the independent attitude of Akritos towards the person of the emperor. Natives of a variety of lands, mostly located in Asia Minor or to the east of it, gather for the burial of Digenis.

Apparently, already in the XII-XIII centuries. adaptations of the epic about Digenis entered ancient Russian literature (“Devgenie’s Act”) and at the same time found an echo in the West - in Flemish poetry. There is reason to believe that at the dawn of the Renaissance, songs about the Byzantine hero were brought by the Greeks to Italy. But even in Greece itself, the image of Akrit lives in people’s memory to this day.

From the second half of the 11th century. the mystical wave that gave birth to Simeon the New Theologian subsides, and a hitherto unprecedented rise in secular tendencies in Byzantine culture begins, which stimulate a more comprehensive assimilation of the ancient heritage than in the time of Photius. In this era, the philosopher, encyclopedist, rhetorician, historian and politician Michael Psellos (1018 - c. 1078 or c. 1096) renews the tradition of Neoplatonism and calls for precise reasoning based on syllogistics. His student and successor in the rank of “consul of philosophers,” John Italus, brought the attraction to ancient idealistic rationalism of the Platonic type to a direct conflict with Christianity and church orthodoxy; By order of Emperor Alexius I Komnenos, Italus' teaching was considered at a church council in 1082 and anathematized. The theologians Eustratius of Nicea, Sotirich Pantevgen, Nikephoros Vasilaki come up with attempts at a rationalistic rethinking of Christian dogma, much similar to what Roscellinus and Abelard carried out in the West in the same era. Representatives of scientific literature are characterized by the desire to reconcile a deep love for pagan antiquity with Christian piety, to build a bridge across the abyss separating the two worlds. The most prominent epigrammatist of the 11th century. John Mavropod, or Euchaitis, expresses in one of his epigrams the highest love for Plato and Plutarch, which was conceivable for medieval Christianity in relation to the pagans - he prays for the salvation of their souls.

If you decided to choose one of the strangers,

Christ, deliver from your disfavor,

Deliver Plato and Plutarch for me!

They are both in word and custom

Your laws are always adhered to.

And since you were unknown to them as a creator god,

You must show them mercy

When you want to save everyone from death.

(Translation by F. Petrovsky)

Mythological names are firmly included in the vocabulary of educated society and serving

his literature: when Michael Psellos needs to scold some monk with whom he was in a quarrel, the following comparisons are used:

The mouth of Charybdis, the face of the abominable Gorgon,

Charon's eyebrow and eye of the evil Tartarus,

Titan noisy, fiery Typhon,

Incinerated by Zeus' arrows...

(Translation by S. Averintsev)

Another monk, in turn, likens Psellus to Zeus, who, due to longing for his “goddesses,” had to leave his “Olympus” (a monastery on a mountain in Asia Minor that bore the same name, where Psellus monasticized for a very short time). This atmosphere of playing bookish witticisms is very characteristic of the entire era.

The most striking work of Psellus, an amazingly versatile author, is “Chronography,” a memoir-historical work covering events from 976 to 1077. The dry, insightful mind of Psellus, not alien to cynicism, the clarity, expressiveness and looseness of his language, the colorful concreteness of personal observations make “Chronography” is a unique phenomenon of medieval historical literature. The freedom of Psellus’s position in his attitude towards the viewer is striking, reaching the point of coquetry, to the feeling of being almost a “director of a drama on a historical theme” (the expression of Ya. N. Lyubarsky), the absolute master of the events being narrated. “While the king is blissful with his sebaste,” Psellus will talk about the emperor’s legitimate wife, and will conclude the story about her with the words: “having brought the story of the queen to this point, we will return again to the sebaste and the autocrat and, if you wish, we will awaken them, separate Constantine We’ll save it for a later story, and we’ll end Sklirena’s life here” (translation by Ya. N. Lyubarsky). The verbal “gesticulation” of these addresses to the reader betrays a degree of self-confident individualistic subjectivity and artistry that brings to mind the authors of the Renaissance. The characteristics of the characters in “Chronography” are unusually nuanced, alien to unequivocal evaluation: the inconsistency of human character is noted precisely, coldly and calmly. This is how Psellus describes John Orphanotrophus, the de facto ruler of the empire during the reign of the weak-willed Michael IV: “He had a sober mind and was smart like no one, as evidenced by his penetrating gaze; having zealously taken up government duties, he showed great zeal for them and acquired incomparable experience in any matter [...] For such properties he could be praised, but here are the opposite: he was changeable in soul, knew how to adapt to the most diverse interlocutors and at the same time showed his character in many guises [...] Being present with him at feasts, I was often amazed at how such a person prone to drunkenness and debauchery could carry the burden of the Roman power on his shoulders. And while intoxicated, he carefully observed the behavior of each of the revelers, as if catching them red-handed, later calling them to account and investigating what they said or did during the drinking bout, so they feared him more when he was drunk than when he was sober” (translation by Ya. N. Lyubarsky). A curious observer and a crafty accomplice in court intrigues, a courtier and rhetorician, a scientist greedy for knowledge, however, along with truly original creativity, he was very much involved in the most mechanical compilation, a lover of the occult sciences and their rationalistic critic, combining both with quite sincere piety, and capable of repulsive hypocrisy when in need, Psellus is not only the central figure of the cultural upsurge of the 11th century. , but also the embodiment of some aspect of the entire Byzantine culture as a whole, opposite to that which was embodied in Simeon the New Theologian. The contrast of these two figures is the central contrast of the spiritual life of Byzantium.

A distant parallel to the work of Psellus is the malicious epigrams of Christopher of Mytilene (c. 1000 - c. 1050). His experience could not compare with the everyday experience of Psellus, but he also knew the wrong side of life as an official, who at the end of his life became the chief judge of Paphlagonia. He is well aware of colleagues like Vasily Ksir, who came as governor to a region that was a “sea of ​​blessings” and left behind a “dry” place. He mocks the collection of countless relics and relics:

Rumor is spreading - people are talking all sorts of things,

And yet, it seems that there is truth in rumors, -

Honest father, as if to the extreme

You are glad when the seller offers you

The saint's venerable remains;

It's like you filled all your chests

And you often open it to show your friends

Procopy of the holy hand (a dozen),

And Nesterov’s jaws are about two dozen,

And with them are eight jaws of George.

(Translation by S. Averintsev)

Life seems to him empty and motley, a poorly structured and easily exposed deception: through the appearance of a newly minted priest, the features of his former worldly profession appear, through the diversity of the human lot - one

and the same dust from which the sons of Adam were created and to which they will return; The short holiday, which the schoolchildren who celebrate it rejoice, is quickly replaced by everyday beatings from the teacher. At the same time, the skeptical poet, of course, does not at all come into conflict with Byzantine orthodoxy and even translates the annual cycle of the church calendar into poetry.

Apparently, the fruit of the scientific studies of the era was a unique dramatic work of its kind, which is usually called “Christ the Passion-Bearer” (in different manuscripts it bears different titles, for example: “A drama, according to Euripides, expounding for us the completed incarnation and saving suffering of our Lord Jesus Christ"). Manuscript tradition attributes this tragedy to Gregory of Nazianzus, but language and metrics force it to be attributed to the 11th-12th centuries. This reading drama stands out against the backdrop of Byzantine literature. The poetic introduction promises:

Following Euripides,

I will tell you about the torment that redeemed the world.

Indeed, the imitation of Euripides was brought to the direct use of his poems (slightly turned), so that the replicas of Medea's nurse, Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, etc. were successively put into the mouth of the Mother of God. The author also used the poems of Aeschylus and Lycophron. The structure of the tragedy is static. The central and most intense scene is “Kommos,” Mary’s lamentation over the body of Jesus:

Alas, alas! What am I missing? What do I touch?

What kind of dead body rests in my hands?

Is he now in grief and horror?

Do I put it on my chest? Am I crying for him?

Goodbye! I greet you for the last time,

The deceased, born on the mountain,

Murdered, godlessly murdered!

Let your mother kiss your right hand.

...................

How, O king, will I greet you with sobs?

How, oh God, do I cry to you?

What song will pour out from the depths of the heart?

Here you are lying, and the shroud has swaddled you,

My child is like a veil in infancy!..

(Translation by S. Averintsev)

Then a twist occurs: a messenger appears, announcing the resurrection of Christ, and Easter rejoicing begins. The drama rests on two lyrical parts, giving emotional poles of sad and joyful mood. Each emotion in itself does not know development; the transition from sorrow to joy occurs instantly, as a response to the message of the messenger. Action is replaced by reaction to action. If new European imitations of the Greek tradition, as a rule, strengthen the element of dramatic action, then Byzantine imitation completely rejects this element, returning to the original (Aeschylean and even pre-Aeschylean) structure of tragedy as a static “action”.

Neoclassical trends are also taking over historical prose. Already Nikephoros Bryennius (c. 1062 - c. 1140) in his “Sketches for the History of Tsar Alexei” (i.e. Alexius I Komnenos) noticeably imitates Xenophon. Nikephoros's wife, daughter of Alexios I Anna Komnena (b. 1083), dedicated a kind of epic in prose ("Alexiad"), marked by strong Atticist and purist aspirations, to the deeds of her father. Anna's models are Thucydides and Polybius; its vocabulary is far from the living language of the era. When she has to cite a colloquial expression, she stipulates and explains it as if it were a foreign language. However, the picture of Byzantine literature at the end of the 11th century. not all of it is painted in classic tones. It is already characteristic that, along with the ancient heritage, Eastern literature attracts keen interest; The orientalization of Byzantine taste, which we noted in connection with Digenis Akritos, continues. During the reign of Alexei I Komnenos (1081-1118) and on his instructions, Simeon Seth translated from Arabic the fable collection “Kalila and Dimna”, which was Indian in origin (Simeon’s version received the title “Stephanit and Ikhnilat” and with it passed into Old Russian literature). In the same era, the Book of Sinbad (Sinbad-name, in the Greek version of Sintip), also a collection of edifying texts, was translated from Syriac.

The “Poems of the grammarian Mikhail Glyka, which he wrote when he was in prison at the machinations of a certain spiteful critic” (written after 1159, when the author was blinded and thrown into prison) consists of a motley mixture of teachings of worldly wisdom and complaints about one’s fate. The thoughts and images of this poem, written in “political” verse, precisely in their triviality, represent an excellent compendium of commonplaces characteristic of the spiritual life of the average Byzantine literate; and the language of the poem is in agreement with this, approaching the vernacular. Of course, the most vivid passages of the poem are complaints about the malice of informers and the horrors of prison:

You ask what death is, do you want to know Hades?

Numera's prison is Hades, it's worse than Hades,

This prison surpassed all the horrors of Hades.

In Hades - rumor says - you can see each other,

And this consoles those who suffer there.

And in this impenetrable darkness, in a deep dungeon

Not a single ray shines, not a word can you hear;

Only darkness and smoke swirl here, the thick darkness envelops everything,

Doesn't let you see each other, doesn't let you know.

(Translation by M. E. Grabar-Passek)

The work of the most prominent Byzantine poet of the 12th century has a complex and diverse character. Theodora Prodromus (born about 1100). First of all, we are struck by its genre diversity. Theodore was no stranger to the learned genres of high literature: he wrote dialogues in verse and prose, didactic poems, and a huge novel in verse “Rodantha and Dosicles” (4614 meters), which for the first time after a centuries-long break updated the ancient tradition of erotic storytelling. Considerable learning must have been required from Theodore for his parody of the classical tragedy of the Aeschylean type - “The War of the Cat and the Mice”: the miniature volume of this thing does not prevent it from having all the attributes of the tragic genre (chorus, etc.) and using typical techniques of tragic technique (composition , built on peripeteia, stichomythical dialogues, where each replica fits into one verse, commos with the participation of the choir). In a purely formal aspect, “The War of the Cat and the Mice” curiously resembles “Christ the Passion-Bearer”: as there, here in the center is the pathetic cry of the mother over the body of her son (the queen of the mice over the hero-prince):

Queen. Alas, alas, alas, alas, my child!

Choir. Alas, alas, Kreill is ours! Ah, our lord!

Queen. When, when, oh son, will we have to meet?

Choir. Where, where did you disappear, leaving life?

Queen. About sorrow, about pain, about burden!

Choir. Oh sorrow! And again - about sorrow!

Queen. You don’t see, child, the radiant sun!

Choir. Only dust and dust - our whole life is a mouse,

Only the ghost of a shadow - all deeds and thoughts.

(Translation by S. Averintsev)

But no matter how good these stylizations of Prodrome are, they do not contain his true meaning. He also worked in genres of a completely different type, where, with unprecedented courage, he introduced everyday life writing into Byzantine literature (close in style to the depiction of everyday prose that urban short stories developed in the pre-Renaissance West). Like his Western brethren, Theodore is not afraid to laugh at sacred objects: to do this, he introduces animals into the game - in the atmosphere of the “cosmic” universalization of church concepts, it was so natural to imagine that animals were also familiar with them. And so, in Prodrome’s prose scene, the scolding mouse, having fallen into the paws of a cat, begins to pour out quotes from penitential psalms: “Oh, lady, let not having reproached me with your wrath, but punish me with your anger! My heart is confused within me, and the fear of death attacks me! My iniquity has exceeded my head!..”, etc. The cat, in response to these cries, offers to quote the prophet Hosea (VI, 6) in a new edition: “I want food, not sacrifice.” In his other works, Prodrome approaches the depicted everyday life closely, without resorting to book-travesty or fable mediation. Here he sketches (in the prose humoresque “The Executioner, or the Doctor”) a frightening portrait of an ignorant tooth-cutter performing a sacred act over the poet’s gums; Here he draws a nun who is fed up with his monastery:

After all, if I just leave church for a little while

Yes, to miss Matins - well, very few things happen! -

How will they go, how will the reproaches and reproaches go:

“Where were you during the censing? Take a hundred bows!

Where were you, how did they sing the kathisma? Now sit without bread!

Where were you during the Six Psalms? There will be no wine for you!

Where were you when Vespers was going on? Drive you away, that’s all!”

And even like this: “Stand and sing! Yes, louder! Yes, more soulful!

Why are you muttering? Do not be lazy! Don't waste your time!

Don’t itch, don’t scratch, and don’t scratch your nails!”

(Translation by M. Gasparov)

In a whole series of poems, Theodore Prodromus depicts the unfortunate fate of an educated man who, with all his learning, is unable to feed himself; he sniffs with envy the smell of roast wafting from the home of his neighbor, an illiterate artisan; he listens to the reproaches of his wife, who has not seen a single gift from him since the wedding day. The mask of a beggar poet, sometimes crying about his sorrows, sometimes laughing at his gluttony, appealed to a great many Byzantine poets: Prodromus had many imitators and successors. A whole “prodromic” literature has grown up, among which it is not so easy to identify the authentic works of Prodromus. If we remember that Theodore was precisely a contemporary of the Western European vagants, who wore the same mask of clownish vagrancy and begging and, under the protection of this mask, allowed themselves the same unusual ease in the face of the authorities of medieval society - the facts of Byzantine

literature will find themselves within a broad historical and literary perspective.

The fruit of the secular tendencies of Byzantine cultural development was a return to the ancient form of the love-adventure novel. This form, however, undergoes a significant restructuring, moving from the realm of prose to the realm of poetry. Also, “The Tale of Isminia and Ismina” by Eumatius Makremvolita is written, like late antique novels, in flowery, rhythmic rhetorical prose; but “Rodanthe and Dosicles” by Theodore Prodromus is a novel in verse: prose is replaced by iambic trimeters. The example of Theodore is followed by his contemporary and admirer Nikita Evgenian, author of the novel “The Tale of Drosilla and Charicles.” The plot scheme of Byzantine novels remains true to the ancient model: in the center is the passionate, sensual, but also sublime love of a beautiful and virgin couple, ignited at first sight, preserved in disastrous trials and unimaginable adventures, then crowned with a happy marriage. To this scheme, Byzantine writers add folklore motifs as decoration, as well as a play of symbols and allegories in medieval taste. Rhetorical descriptions (ekphrases) play a special role. This is how Nikita Evgenian describes the beauty of the heroine:

The maiden was like the starry sky

In a cloak shining with gold and purple,

Drawn over shoulders for the sake of celebration;

Stately, graceful and with white hands;

Blush like a rose, red lips;

Eye outline black perfect

................

The nose is carved gracefully; straight row of teeth

Sparkles with a snow-white string of pearls;

Eyebrows arch like a bow,

They threaten with the arrow of Eros, full of joy;

And milk, as if mixed with a rose,

Like a painter, she painted everything

Nature is a perfect body...

(Translation by F. Petrovsky)

The Hellenic admiration for bodily beauty, which created a thousand-year-old rhetorical tradition for its expression, is inextricably intertwined in such ecphrases with the Byzantine craving for luxury, for decorative excess, for a verbal flow that overflows. Compared to the ancient novel, the Byzantine novel is characterized by greater lyricism and less narrative; the action recedes into the background, while expressive descriptions and exaggerated outpourings of feelings almost become an end in themselves.

John Tzetz appears in the 12th century. a somewhat outdated type of erudite by this time, as he was known in the era of Photius, Arethas, and Constantine Porphyrogenitus. His works, important for the transmission of ancient heritage, are somewhat curious in nature. Thus, he composed a monumental poetic (!) commentary for a collection of his own letters, consisting of 12,674 “political” fifteen-syllables and known under the title “Chiliads”. This is a completely disorderly demonstration of one's learning; if, say, one of the letters accidentally mentions a certain Timarchus, an opponent of the ancient Attic orator Aeschines, then Tsets devotes 185 verbose verses to Timarchus. In the 11th chapter of the Chiliad, by the way, some guidance on rhetoric is given. Three hexametric poems of Tsets have a purely formal character - “The Pre-Homeric Acts” (the youth of Paris, the abduction of Helen), “The Homeric Acts” (a brief retelling of the “Iliad”) and “The Post-Homeric Acts” (the destruction of Troy according to Trifiodorus, Quintus of Smyrna and John Malala).

Eustathius of Thessaloniki has a completely different level of attitude towards the treasury of classical antiquity, who managed to combine in himself a deep connoisseur of ancient authors and an astute observer of contemporary life. This scientist, who worked his way up from a minor official in the patriarchal office to a master of rhetoricians, and then the Metropolitan of Thessalonica, worked a lot on commentaries on the works of Homer, Pindar, Aristophanes, Dionysius Periegetos; These works constituted a fundamentally new stage in the history of Byzantine philology, anticipating the textual work of Renaissance humanists. He entered the history of literature primarily as the author of “Consideration of monastic life for the sake of correcting it” - a sharp social-critical work that castigates the vices of Byzantine monasticism and is distinguished by the apt observation of everyday life sketches. His “Tale of the Capture of Thessalonica” (about the capture of the city by the Normans) is also distinguished by a rare concreteness of figurative vision for a Byzantine author. The purely rhetorical development of general schemes is replaced by an interest in unexpected detail (in itself, of course, quite compatible with the general rhetorical attitude, but opening up new possibilities for literary culture).

The heyday of Byzantine culture since 1071 (the date of the Battle of Manzikert, after which Asia Minor was ceded to the Seljuks) was backdropped by the decline of Byzantine statehood and was forcibly interrupted by the catastrophe of 1204. This year is the date of the “Latin” conquest: April 12-13 for those greedy for power and the spoils of the knights

During the Fourth Crusade, they took Constantinople by storm, plundered it and founded their own state on the ruins of the Byzantine order (contemporaries most often called this state Romania; in science it is customary to designate it as the Latin Empire). The Count of Flanders, Baldwin, sat on the throne of the Roman basileus; The dominance of foreign feudal lords spread throughout Greece, and Western forms of feudalism were forcibly implanted.

Porphyrogenitus was born in 905. He was the son of Leo VI and came from the Macedonian dynasty. His figure is of particular interest to historians. The fact is that during his time on the throne, this ruler was not so much involved in politics as he devoted his time to science and the study of books. He was a writer and left behind a rich literary heritage.

Heir to the throne

The only son of Leo VI the Philosopher, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, was born from his marriage to his fourth wife. Because of this, according to Christian rules, he could not occupy the throne. Nevertheless, Leo wanted to see his son as emperor and therefore made him his co-ruler during his lifetime. With his death in 912, the younger brother of the deceased, Alexander, began to come to power. He removed the young Konstantin from managing affairs, and also deprived all of his nephew’s supporters of influence. It seemed that the new emperor had firmly taken power into his own hands. However, already in 913, Alexander, not yet old, died from a long illness.

Loss of real power

Now Constantine finally became emperor. However, he was only 8 years old. Because of this, a regency council was established, headed by Patriarch Nicholas the Mystic. has always been characterized by instability of power, which was passed from hand to hand through conspiracies and military coups. The precarious position of the regency council allowed naval commander Roman Lekapin to become head of state.

In 920 he declared himself emperor. At the same time, at first the new autocrat declared himself only as the defender of the legitimate child emperor. However, Lekapin managed to paralyze the will of Constantine without much difficulty, who was not at all interested in power and treated it as a burden.

Under Roman Lekapin

The new ruler did not belong to the previously reigning dynasty, so he decided to legitimize himself by marrying Constantine to his daughter Helen. The young man was removed from real power. He devoted his youth to science and reading books. At this time, Constantinople was one of the world centers of education. Thousands of unique tomes dedicated to various disciplines and cultures were stored here. It was they who captivated the young man for the rest of his life.

At this time, Roman Lekapin surrounded Constantine with people loyal to himself, who followed the legitimate monarch. As the real ruler increasingly usurped power, conspiracies began to emerge among the aristocracy against him. Almost every year new traitors were identified and dealt with without much ceremony. Any methods were used: intimidation, confiscation of property, tonsure as a monk and, of course, executions.

Return of the imperial title

Constantine Porphyrogenitus received his nickname in honor of the name of the hall in the imperial palace in which he was born. This epithet emphasized his legitimacy, which Father Leo VI so wanted.

For most of his life, Constantine Porphyrogenitus was content to only attend formal ceremonies. He was not trained to lead an army, so he was not interested in a military career. Instead, Konstantin was engaged in science. Thanks to his works, modern historians can form the most complete picture of the life of Byzantium in the 10th century.

In 944, the usurper Roman Lecapinus was overthrown by his own sons. Riots began in the capital. Ordinary residents did not like the chaos in power. Everyone wanted to see the legitimate heir of Constantine Porphyrogenitus at the head of the state, and not the children of the usurper. Finally, the son of Leo VI finally became emperor. He remained so until 959, when he died unexpectedly. Some historians are supporters of the theory that the ruler was poisoned by his son Roman.

Literary works of Constantine

The main book that Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus left behind was the treatise “On the Administration of the Empire.” This document was drawn up by the ruler for his predecessors. hoped that his advice on government would help future autocrats avoid conflicts within the country. The book was not intended for the general public. It was published after the fall of Byzantium, when several copies miraculously reached Europe. The title was also given by the German publisher (Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus did not give the title to the secret treatise).

In his book, the author examined in detail the life and foundations of the state. It has 53 chapters. Many of them are dedicated to the peoples who inhabited the empire or neighboring it. Foreign culture has always been an area in which Konstantin Porphyrogenitus was interested. He left unique essays about the Slavs, which are no longer found in any source of that era. It is curious that the emperor even described the visit of the Kyiv princess Olga to Constantinople. As you know, in Constantinople the Slavic ruler accepted Christian baptism when her people still professed the pagan faith.

In addition, the author examined the administrative and economic structure of Ancient Rus'. In different chapters there are descriptions of Slavic cities: Novgorod, Smolensk, Vyshgorod, Chernigov, as well as Kyiv. The emperor also paid attention to other neighboring peoples: Bulgarians, Hungarians, Arabs, Khazars, etc. The original treatise was written in Greek. The book was later translated into Latin, and after that into other European languages. This work mixes a variety of narrative genres, which were skillfully used by Konstantin Porphyrogenitus. “On the Administration of an Empire” is a unique example of medieval literature.

"About Ceremonies"

Another important book written by the emperor was the collection “On Ceremonies.” In it, the autocrat described all the rituals accepted in the Byzantine court. The collection also includes an interesting appendix on military tactics. According to Constantine, these notes were to become a teaching aid for future rulers of a huge state.

Philanthropist and educator

Constantine not only wrote books, but also patronized various authors and institutions. Having matured, he first of all began to process the huge literary corpus that Orthodox Byzantium had accumulated. These were various lives of saints kept in the libraries of monasteries. Many of them existed in a single copy, and rare books were damaged from antiquity and poor storage conditions.

In this enterprise, the emperor was assisted by the logothete and master Simeon Metaphrastus. It was in his processing that many Christian literary artifacts have reached our times. The master received money from the emperor, with which he purchased rare copies of books, and also maintained an office with a large staff of clerks, librarians, etc.

Encyclopedia of Constantine

The emperor became the inspirer and sponsor of other similar educational events. Thanks to him, an encyclopedia consisting of more than fifty volumes was published in Constantinople. This collection included knowledge from a wide variety of fields in both the humanities and the natural sciences. The main merit of the encyclopedia of the era of Constantine was the codification and organization of a huge array of disparate information.

Much knowledge was also necessary for practical purposes. For example, Konstantin financed the compilation of a collection of articles on agriculture. The knowledge contained in these documents helped for several generations to achieve the greatest harvest in the vast